Roland Fantom G8

[Joe1871]

Believe it or not, I asked my wife to go to the local GCto pick up a keyboard I had ordered. Typical to GC there was a screwup and my very smart and wonderful wife decided she didn't like the keyboardtheyweretrying to give her, so she upgraded it a bit and brought home home a Roland Fantom G8. I am a guitar player who dabbles in keys. I don't know a lot about keyboards. Obviously this thing is very high endandhas a billion features. What is the general opinion of this keyboard. She gave me the usual "if you don't like it take it back and get what you want" line, but I would only do that if there was some very compelling reason. Is there a dramatically better keyboard at this price point?

TIA

Joe

[mjtripper]

I'm sort of in the same boat as you - mainly a guitar player but dabbles in other stuff. I might get blasted for this but for people like us I think the flagship model from roland, korg, or kurtzweil is just fine for us and probably too much product anyway. Without a specific need for a feature or sound on one of the big three I think any of them would be just fine.

That being said the one thing I do usually recommend to fellow guitar or bass players that want/need a keyboard is if you already have a daw with a sampler such as logic then look at the performance series instead of the workstation series of the big three which is usually the same product minus the sampler and maybe some more features that you can do in the daw no problem. For roland this would be the juno. The korg workstation is the m3 with the m50 being the sampler-free. For kurzweil the sampler is pc3k and sampler-less is the pc3.

Now, the only advantage I can see of getting the other product is that of less cash outlay so if that isn't a concern then ignore everything I just said I really don't think you would be better or worse off with any of the other products. These are all rompler/va type synth products instead of analog synths and from the research I did when trying to decide which way to go I thought there was a much larger difference between all the various analog options and I couldn't even begin to offer advice related to those. I decided to go rompler because it seemed to be the more versatile option for what I wanted which was one device to augment all the other stuff I did. Hope that helps.

[kstackm]

Originally Posted by Joe1871

Believe it or not, I asked my wife to go to the local GCto pick up a keyboard I had ordered. Typical to GC there was a screwup and my very smart and wonderful wife decided she didn't like the keyboardtheyweretrying to give her, so she upgraded it a bit and brought home home a Roland Fantom G8. I am a guitar player who dabbles in keys. I don't know a lot about keyboards. Obviously this thing is very high endandhas a billion features. What is the general opinion of this keyboard. She gave me the usual "if you don't like it take it back and get what you want" line, but I would only do that if there was some very compelling reason. Is there a dramatically better keyboard at this price point?

TIA

Joe

At that level you are pretty much there when it comes to workstation/keyboards. There are a few options that some might feel are slightly 'better', but the Fantom G8 (albeit about 4 to 6 yr old tech) is about where most of the workstations are at.

If you are looking for a more computer oriented modern processor type of workstation, the Korg Kronos is generally the choice. If you want a workstation that has more of a clean acoustic sounding feel to it the Yamaha Motif XF or Kurzweil PC3K is more in that line.

Other than that you would begin to get into the more specified synth area which really becomes a true matter of taste.

So to answer the question, "Is there a dramatically better keyboard at this price point?". Not really. It's definitely a preferential thing at the level of a Fantom G even as old as its tech is.

If you have a good computer setup with a decent array of soft-synths, virtual instruments and the like, I'd lean more toward a Kurzweil or Motif XF first and then if not those a Fantom G. If you are not the "computer musician" or "in the box" sort of guy but want to be moderately competitive with "today's pop sound", I'd lean toward getting a Korg Kronos (which is like having the computer synths sounds in a keyboard, albeit with a few really good acoustic sounds) and possibly a Motif XS Rack or Fantom XR Rack to balance out the acoustic, more 'analog-ee' end of what you have.