I've pretty much made up my mind to drop dollars on the Roland Fantom X7. There's a bunch of reasons, but just think about the skip back sampling. That has got to be one of the most innovations a keyboard/workstation has ever had. Not sure if there have been any others with a like feature, but I could be wrong. With this, you will NEVER lose an inspired moment or that lucky strike of the keys you hit upon AGAIN! Now I guess you could have the sequencer in record mode running at all times as soon as you sit down to play with ideas, most likely with the damn metronome click popping in your ears. Or you could have a good audio recording device going at all times to capture stuff so you cab at least go back and sample the passage. The Fantom simply and steadily keeps recording the last 30 seconds without you ever having to think about it. That's just an outstanding feature for most of us to have, especially people like me(which is probably a good majority of people in this forum) who can't truly play piano. When you hit a great chord progression or what ever, it never seems easy to remember how you did it or truly pull off a good recreation of it. Think about how many times you stuck a brilliant sounding passage, tried to recreate it with the same feel and velocity strike of notes, and end up settling for something lesser because you don't want to waste time mental energy on trying to get it perfect. It's fustrating as hell when you know you missed something really unique. Skip back is the s***. Also, it seems that just about everyone I have read from says it is extremely easy to use - one guys said he didn't have to open the manual but once. My eyes are bad, so the big, easy to read color screen is another standout point for me. I've also read that the pad bank is very mpc-like on the X and feels and responds good. I was thinking about getting the MPD16 to go with the X7, but I will wait and see just how much I end up liking the pads on the X7 before I do that. My only other issue is whether to stick with getting the X7 or X8 with the weighted keys. I can't play piano, but I am a fairly good faker with a sequencer. Are weighted keys mainly for people who can actually play, or are they generally considered to bring out better notes and better sounding compositions for just about anybody who plays them? Since I have the money right now, I would be willing to shell out for it if weighted keys is something that may help give my tracks much more expressiveness than if I didn't have them. Please let me know your opinion of weighted keys and what you think of the Fantom.
