Believe it or not, I just read the entire thread! There is a lot of valuable information here, but also a lot of noise. Armed with all this knowledge, today I went to GC and tried the VR-09 out for myself. For those of you just joining this thread, I will try to do a quick summary, based on my limited hands-on experience and the collective vast experience of the forum. I will try to state the facts without bias or opinion the best that I can:
It is very light at 12 lbs. It has gig-ready organ, EP and synth sounds. The acoustic piano patches are decent for rock, but not acceptable for a jazz or solo gig. It is a performance-oriented board with a well-thought out array of knobs and buttons. and you can create good sounds very quickly. It has a full set of drawbars. They are narrower than standard ones. Pitch-bending and modulation is done with a joystick. The keys are a little narrower than normal. The action and feel is well-suited for organ/synth playing, but poor for piano playing. The system for saving and recalling patches via registrations has limitations and may not work as one expects. Editing of most synth parameters requires an iPad connected via wifi or cable. Wifi requires a Wifi USB card. You can connect a weighted keyboard to it via MIDI, but if you play organ/synth on the VR-09 and piano on the weighted keyboard, the piano will not have any effects except reverb. This means no trem for EPs, etc. The damper pedal cannot be assigned to just control the piano. If you are playing the same patch on both keyboards, you wont have these limitations. The drawbars do not send standard MIDI controller messages, so you cannot use them to control a software-based organ like VB3. You cannot control the wah effect via an expression pedal. The last system update (1.03) was released almost two years ago (9/18/14).
I did not buy a VR-09 today, but I am strongly considering it, even though I can afford a more expensive board like a Nord Electro 5D 61 or Hammond SK-1. Something about VR-09s versatility, control layout and form factor appealed to me. We will see
