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Early JW50s had a habit of having stuck notes (very annoying). I bought one of the first models shipped to Canada. Roland has an eprom upgrade for this problem, a simple fix.
The keyboard is built around an easy to use sequencer. The sounds are good. For home recording it works well.
The keyboard uses a double density disk drive. It looks like it could be easily swapped for a high density 3 1/2" drive but I haven't tried it. My guess is that you would still get 720k per disk.
Downside: you can't split the keyboard or layer sounds live (one sound at a time) by design however:
If you route a midi cable from out to in and select the transmit channel to another channel number you can layer two sounds live.
The keyboard is aftertouch sensative. Pressing any key down harder alters the sound for the whole keyboard (not individual key aftertouch).
I find it good for performing live, good sounds but not easy to find. There is a factory sound set and a user definable sound set (pick up to 128 sounds, edit them and store them for easy recall if you can remember the number. I prefer to have sounds devided by groups on a keyboard eg. press strings then select the string sound you want instead of dialing through 128 sounds to find the one you want.
Overall I give it a 4 out of 5. Good keyboard, controller, sequencer.
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