Once again another major show (NAMM 2011) comes along with no further ARX expansion boards for the Fantom G. Having heavily invested in this keyboard I can't express my frustration enough that they have not yet released a board based on the V piano.
Come on Roland - your very happy to place this technology in numerous other digital pianos. What about supporting your existing customers.
A PIANO BOARD ( not electric ) IS LONG OVERDUE and i certainly haven't got any intention of buying another of your digital pianos - I've had my Roland MKS 20 module for over 25 years and it is still going strong but don't want to have to cart it around with the already very hefty Fantom G8 !!!
Quite agree !
I was led to believe by the salesman that there would be other cards to follow and that Roland would be investing time in the development of this machine. However it wouldn't surprise me if we are expected, once more , to buy the next installment that gives us a little bit more, then another, and another , etc. What a con this could turn out to be. They don't even want to fix the multitude of errors there are currently with this keyboard. SHAME on you Roland!
Spoke to a Roland Rep about to go to NAMM and he said there were no plans currently to develop any more ARX boards. With the SuperNatural PIANO and now (Jupiter-80) SuperNatural Synthesiser (on board the latest keyboards) I think this is very short sighted
I've read in a couple of places that they're no longer developing the platform, so that would imply that there will be no more ARX cards. I hope that's not true, but I suspect it is. Something that supports this view is that some stores in the US (sweetwater.com, zzSounds, Ebay) you can by ARX-01 (drums) and ARX-02 (E.Piano) for $99, rather than the £350 they're selling for here. Fedex shipping is about $70 and import duty / fees for both cards together will be about £20.
I look at all of the fantastic SRX cards that are still available and wonder if I should have bought a second hand Fantom X8 rather than the new G8.
I really want a great grand piano sound, and was hoping to by an ARX for that, but it looks like I'll be going down the sample route from here: http://www.fantomgsounds.com.
[EDIT]
The All Piano pack from Fantomgsounds.com is really great. I just downloaded them today. The Yamaha and Steinway pianos are far better than anything on the G8, and I get quality samples without having to run a VSTi on the computer. Result.
I'm a bit late on this one, but for what it's worth, Roland have really missed a trick with their arx boards. The pianos on the G are awful, I still use the east west grand at 256meg in akais. The srx strings are generally derived from the jv series, which in turn came from the original CDROM. I can trace sounds on the expanded xv5080 right back to these disks, the disks still sound much more realistic, across all sounds, particularly orchestral.
Why they chose electric pianos, brass and drums as their only arx boards is baffling, especially when software is getting cheaper.
The OS. system I find pointlessly difficult, unless you have nothing else to do for a few days.
I think the guitars, with a bit of fiddling, are very strong as are the basses, various synth sounds are useful too, the strings are naff as are most of the woodwind. The Mariachi trumpet saved the day on a job recently - don't ask.
All in all, powerful, clumsy, underdeveloped, versatile FX.
Cheers,
Steve.
Hi Steve.
I hear what you're saying, and agree.
I have a Juno G which internally is basically a poor man's Fantom X6 on a diet.
The piano sounds on the Juno G are better than the Fantom G. The arpeggio options are much simpler to use (much better visualisation of what he arp is actually going to play). The sequencer works as you would expect - none of this "phrase" nonsense that make it difficult to split sections up in the internal DAW.
Sure, it it only has 3 MFX, rather than 16 part FX + 2 general FX + reverb, Oh the Juno G also has 1 SRX slot.
In hindsight, I wonder if I should have bought a Fantom X8 rather than a G8 :(
