CalUKGR

I owned my T5 for about a year and half (bought factory-fresh). I'm still waiting for my Genos to arrive, at which time the T5 gets part-exchanged. I won't be entirely sorry to see it go. In truth, though, many of the issues I had with the Tyros 5 won't be addressed by the Genos, either. Things which annoyed me about the T5: 1. No audio over USB - Yamaha's top-of-the-line arranger keyboard did not have a built-in USB audio interface. The Genos doesn't, either. Baffling. 2. Yamaha Expansion Manager/Expansion Board - unwieldy, over-fussy and frankly a pain. Changing anything on your expansion board means reformatting the whole board and re-loading in everything again - every single time you want to make even the slightest change to the board's contents. It's time-consuming and hugely irritating. 3. The built-in sequencer. Unintuitive, complex and frankly a pain to use. Far more trouble than it was ever worth. 4. Aesthetics. I always hated the look of the Tyros keyboards. The Genos does improve upon this greatly, imo. Genos looks sleeker and more professional. It's almost as if Yamaha finally wants to take its flagship seriously. ...Just a few gripes, off the top of my head. Genos won't be that much better and many of the same shortcomings will persist. It'll just be an even better sounding the Tyros 5 with a few added bells and whistles, but as far as I can tell Yamaha have not reinvented the arranger in Genos. It's not a revolution, just a mild evolution, with an even higher price-tag attached to it.

Excellent video! A point well-made!

Peter Baartmans is a fascinating musician. Yes, he'll churn out the cheese if he has to but he's amazingly versatile and his command of the Tyros 5 was masterful. Playing an arranger is a complex business. It's multi-tasking in real-time, like micromanaging a real-time strategy game. You're worrying about several things at once, all while attempting to play with more than mere competence. It takes musical talent, experience and great mental agility to really get these arrangers to shine. I'm nowhere near Baartmans' level, but he does give me a standard to aspire to. I'm looking forward to seeing his first Genos demo video. Martin Harris's first few efforts were interesting, but Baartmans - for my money - will bring the sparkle.

Thanks, I will. BTW, I'll report back on the faults and criticisms I have of Genos, too. I had many issues with my Tyros 5 - it was a fantastic keyboard, but of course it had its fair share of problems, too. Which keyboard doesn't?

I've got my Genos on pre-order, just awaiting delivery later this month. Frankly, I can't wait. I previously had a Tyros 5 and I can honestly say it was a magnificent keyboard. I think Yamaha have finally redesigned their flagship arranger to appeal to a younger, more modern potential buyer, but they're still trying to keep their traditionally older (and very lucrative) market happy, too. At this level (in terms of price) it's a very tricky balancing act. For all the criticisms of Tyros, Yamaha appeared to do very nicely out of it: this thing went through five iterations! Genos is a 'reboot' of the Tyros brand - slicker, updated, more powerful than ever. They must be doing something right and someone must be enjoying these arrangers! 'Pro' musicians have always been sniffy about arrangers, even while they unselfconsciously advocate for the use of sampled loops in their own work. The irony is delicious. It's true arrangers like Tyros get a bad press and if the endless slew of badly-played 'golden oldie hits of yesteryear' populating YT are anything to judge by - hand on heart - that reputation is often well-deserved. But it's a shame. Tyros, as a keyboard, is so much better than its users often portray it. I traded-in my Tyros 5 and paid £2500 in cash to get my hands on a Genos. To me, the keyboard is a Swiss Army knife: a completely comprehensive digital workstation. Feature-wise, you'll be hard to put to match many other keyboards to the specs on offer from Genos. It isn't perfect, of course, and I'm sure other keyboards excel in certain areas that might leave Genos lacking, but overall, if you're after a top-of-the-line master keyboard to 'mothership' your home DAW set-up, you can do a lot worse than look to something like Tyros/Genos. In the end, for all the 'tut-tutting' from seasoned 'pros', these arranger keyboards bring a lot to the table for users with very different needs and priorities. We can't all be highly-trained virtuoso musicians. Many of us don't even read a note of music, so we welcome the assistance (and often the musical education) arrangers like Tyros/Genos can offer us. I just hope the music press/media/YT vloggers give Genos a fair, balanced hearing. Put your prejudices aside and take a good look at the technology on offer here and think about who would want that and why they might be prepared to pay a premium price for it.