Gargamel314 wrote: I really want to urge you to find a way of trying both instruments out, even if it means driving an hour away from home to demo them.
It's well worth an hour (or more) drive to audition these keyboards.
Before Guitar Center built a store here in Lancaster, PA, my friends and I had to drive over an hour to visit any decent pro music store. We made a day of it and spent plenty of time with the different instruments.
Appreciate the feedback - great forum! I have been disappointed in my last few pieces of gear, like “sample pads” that are really just “mute and un-mute of 4 effects overdubs of the same 4-measure phrase”, or “sequencer” on an arranger board that is really just a limited midi song player with no ability to work with external gear, or “8 note polyphony” that is really just 1 or 2 when you turn on BMP sync or use the vocoder.
So, I am attempting to do better research this time before buying. I don’t mind obvious things like double voices cutting polyphony in half, or taking a long time to load songs containing a bunch of long samples, but I hate the kind of cheesy stuff that I have been running into lately (above) that zaps all the fun out of a piece of new gear that you just bought.
the first few times i set the board up to do intrack sampling, it seemed like a lot of steps, but after the 3rd or 4th time i realized it was taking MAYBE 15 seconds to setup. You can probably do it in ~5 - 7 sec (Guessing).
I originally had to have a Motif XS8 (it's 88 keys or nothing at all), because it had GREAT piano, epiano, and acoustic guitar sounds and the arps were nothing like I've ever heard before. I too was advised to play the board for an extended period of time (unlike my prior 5 min). Once I went back and played it for ~30 min, I realized I absolutely hated the action and navigating through what seemed like countless menus...
With the Motif out of the picture, I set my sights on the Fantom X8. By the time I got the money, they were sold out everywhere. So, I started looking at the G8 (keeping in my I barely knew the Korg name. The G8 looking great on paper and even better in the store suffered it's fate due to quality. To me a lot of the group sounds were identical to each other. I tried several piano sounds, which all sounded exactly the same to me. Some of the epiano sounds, all sounded like the same epiano sample, etc. The mouse and big screen are nice, but I play for the church praise team, and I need to change sounds as quickly as possible. Although much faster than the Motif, it's not fast enough when it comes to splits and layers, b/c you have to always set the split and layer point...
The local store told me that the Korg M3-88 was similar to the Motif and Fantom, so I decided to check it out. After much research I ordered the M3 b/c if i didn't like it, they would give me full trade toward another board, so i had nothing to lose. Once I touched it, I knew I had the right board. To me it had the best feel amongst all other keyboards. The touchscreen makes it faster to navigate than the other 2. Sounds are good, but not quite as good as the Motif to me. I love the fact that Korg GIVES AWAY sounds...awesome! As far as I know the M3 is the only board that you can have 2 modules, brains, or whatever you want to call them on the same board...awesome 2! The fact that it's $800 less than the Fantom and $900 less than the Motif and has the same functions is great...awesome 3! Can the Motif or Fantom make an audio CD from the board like the M3?
