Hi All, A bit of a belated intro I've been interested in keyboards since primary school - not that I got any tuition other than 6 months on a portable chord organ when I was in Grade 3.... My next one was a Casiotone MT800 which taught me a lot about chords and composing. Then a made a (comparatively) hug leap into the world of synths and MIDI with a Roland JX-3P. I later sold and "upgraded" to a Roland JUNO-106 What was interesting was that I really missed some of the JX-3P's features - in particular the random LFO function. I also bought a TR-505 drum machine, a Yamaha QX7 sequencer. Later additions were a Korg EX800 (rack module equivalent of the Poly-800) and an Ensoniq ESQ-1 (my first experince of the digital keyboard age!) I still have all this gear - some of it over 20 years old - but infortunately the Juno has developed a DCO issue (not the common one where it goes missing, but this one won't shut off) and the Ensoniq's preamp must have blown during an attempt to retrofit a AA battery case in place of the soldered one. Then life sort of got in the way and I didn't play for a long time (about 10 years) - When we got married, my wife brought with her a Yamaha PSR-500E - and I finally got around to getting to know it better, and started to play it at church about a year ago. It was kind of a strange throw back to the old Casiotone days - except with full size keys, heaps "better" sounds etc.... although I noticed Yamaha's easy chords were reverse to Casio's It was good - because I had to actually learn how to hold chords rather than relying on the easy chords - otherwise I might have fallen back into bad old habits. 12 monhts on, and I pretty much outgrew the Yamaha - I still love some of the sounds from it - but the 24 note polyphony is a killer.... with layered sounds + auto harmony, I was running out of sounds real fast.... plus a 4 patch memory was a struggle. In the end I looked for a new board - and for the modest outlay (my budget around AU$500) I was looking at replacing the PSR with it's latest equivalent incarnation the PSR-E423 But for around the same price I could get a Casio CTK-6000 - which seemed on paper at least to have a lot more features. So I went down to the local keyboard shop to try it out, decided to buy it - and they told me they didn't have any in stock except for the demo one I was playing... Duh! Perhaps this was a master upsell, but they said they did have one CTK-7000 in stock for AU$100 more - so in the end I paid AU$599 for it and spent the next few weekends trying to figure out Casio's big telephone directory of a manual It was interesting though that we still have the invoice for the old PSR-500E - back in its days 20 years ago, the unit was AU$1000. Allowing for inflation etc - prices sure have come down on these things. Moving "back" to Casio from Yamaha was an interesting experience. I don't like Casio's flush buttons - they're hard to find and press during performance (eg the rhythm variations etc. Some functions I used a lot on the Yamaha are hidden behind multiple keystrokes on the Casio - eg transpose, rhythm volume etc The rhythm pattern variation between "normal" and "variation" is too subtle on the Casio. I miss some of the patterns on the Yamaha which were very complex (which in itself lead to the polyphony issues). This bigges tthing I miss thought is the Yamaha's 6 button rhythm function (Intro, Normal, Fill In 1, Fill in 2, Var (Bridge), ending) - Hitting Fill in 2 in Normal mode causes the keyboard to go Normal > Fill in > Variation with one button which is great! On the Casio, I find you almost inevitably (unless there is some function I am yet to find!) are locked into Normal > Variation (Which can be done on the Yamaha with 1 button as well) because they only have 4 buttons (Intro, Normal/Fill In 1, Var / Fill in 2, Ending) Oddly, I also miss the Lap Steel and string sounds from the Yamaha.... Surprisingly too, given the number of years of development you would have thought happening in 20 + years, the drums actually sound better on the old unit too.... Anyway, that's where I am right now.... The Y-man
