Devnor

I've had my Fantom 7 for 4 days. At least 40 hours on the machine already. The organ is all PCM and drawbars control the registrations. There is nothing to see here. There are 380 ish PCM waves but there are empty banks so expansion looks very possible. There's a ton of old presets with familiar names but they often don't sound as good as the Jupiter. Some basic editing brings them to life...replace a PCM partial with VA and filter adjustments. The control surface makes it super easy to get to into and around the synth. Many of the new presets make use of the step LFO and they like routing that to pitch which created a few intonation issues in 1 particular composition. I spent a couple days with loop player and TR REC seq stuff. It's fun, ideas go down quick but workflow could be improved and it needs editing functions. By day 4 I was back in Logic and that's where things opened up. MacOS driver installation was a bit tricky, it could be documented better. Before you do anything set the USB setting in Fantom to "vendor" and write/reboot Fantom. 32 inputs and 6 outputs appeared plus MIDI over USB. Nice. DAW control works mixer adjustments, transport control via the pads. I'm Logic key commands guy so it's still faster using QWERTY but if you don't already know this stuff, you won't need a dedicated control surface for DAW. Fantom is 16 part multitimbral. Voices are big enough so they can stand on their own or in pairs. Have to say Fantom is light on EFX, 1 insert per part and 2 master. Fantom 7 synth action is very nice. Better than anything else I've owned. Few quirks...V Piano can only be in zone 1. All the INIT presets in the machine are not fully initialized so watch out (velocity limited to 80, probably other things). Just init the scene before you dive in. Current presets pretty bad. Roland folks very helpful on the FB forum. Folks have issues, usually pilot error and Roland guys are there with the answer. We're all learning the machine together so they've been a huge help. Friends are asking me "are you going to sell the Jupiter? The Kronos?" The answer is neither. They all have their strengths and I've got years learning and understanding these instruments. All together, it sounds glorious. Really wonderful time to play electronic instruments I'm blessed. It's been a very exciting couple weeks!

Internally, Jupiter 80 AT was a bridge to nowhere. Does anyone know if MODX has envelope follower and audio beat sync features?

The horizontal support bar on the keytree can be offset for your pedals. This isn't designed to be a typical stand with boards sitting flat but instead allows for the boards to sit at angles. I've been looking at keytree for my Kronos/Linnstrument/iPad live rig.

My guess is an analog modeled synth along the lines of Diva except with efficient coding and better support. Whatever it is, they can take my money now.

They'll fix in an update. The Jupiters operate the same way...front panel transpose with transpose programmed per registration except the Jupiter has master key shift parameter in system settings. Over the last 2 years my Jupiter was a work in progress as Roland added features based on user feedback. During this time I just tried not to overthink issues and concentrate on the great sounds and what I could make happen with those sounds.

I'm just back from attempting to try out a Kingkorg. 3 of the keys in the lower octave were frozen in the rest position. The rest of the keybed felt like a cheap usb controller but useable. Some of the pots felt really cheap (the smaller ones). Can't believe they want $1300 for this. On the bright side the Kronos X keybed is much improved and I really enjoyed playing that board.