New Fantom owner comments and gripes

[EvereadyBro]

Hello Fellow Fantom Fans,

I bought my Fantom 7 roughly three weeks ago and have been enjoying it immensely. My previous keyboard was a Yamaha MODX 7 that I bought in 2017. It was time for an upgrade and my choices came down to the Nautilus and the Fantom. The Nautilus has excellent sounds and an excellent keybed, but the limited number of controls on the panel was the deal breaker for me.

The keybed on the Fantom 7 is excellent -- smooth, fast, reasonably quiet and just the right amount of resistance IMO. I find it works well for acoustic pianos, Rhodes, organs, synths, etc. Pretty much everything.

The sounds are gorgeous too. I'm still exploring the instrument and still discovering little gems hidden away here and there.

My gripes are relatively minor:

1. When I create new Scenes I'm in the habit of appending my initials (DB) to the Scene names. My thought was that I could search for all my created Scenes by simply entering "DB", but it looks like there is no Scene search feature. Do I have that right? If so, then there's really no point in this naming convention.

2. Related to #1, when you search for Tones the search is limited to only Tones that are within whatever Category (e.g. E.Piano) and sub-category (e.g. E.Piano1) you are in. The compartmentalization of Tones is not helpful when searching.

3. The tone wheel organ (TWO) sounds great, but it is unfortunate that it is limited to Zone 2 only. I would love to be able to have the TWO sound available in another zone so that I could split the keyboard and have both sides (left and right hand) using it.

4. Rearranging Scenes is awkward at best. I have decided to use the D Bank as the area for all my custom Scenes, but I often want to rearrange them there. The best way to do this, as far as I can tell, is to save an existing custom Scene to some unused location, then Initialize its old location to make room for a Scene that I want to put in its place. I think others here have mentioned that a "Patch/Editor/Librarian" app for Mac and PC that performed functions like this would be really nice to have. I'd be willing to pay $25 or so for such an app. I was a little surprised that there is no app like that as yet.

Anyway, I love the Fantom and will appreciate any future updates Roland sends our way.

Cheers!

Dennis B.

[EvereadyBro]

Hi Again,

Doh! Of course there's a Scene search function. It's right on the top right-hand side of the Scene select screen.

Still learning the keyboard!

Dennis B.

[xp30]

1. When I create new Scenes I'm in the habit of appending my initials (DB) to the Scene names. My thought was that I could search for all my created Scenes by simply entering "DB", but it looks like there is no Scene search feature. Do I have that right? If so, then there's really no point in this naming convention.

The scene and tone ratings (0-3 stars) are also useful to find frequently used scenes and tones.

Some people delete all the factory scenes as the very first thing, because they are mostly a distraction. You can also first export all factory scenes to a thumb drive, and if needed, import them later individually.

2. Related to #1, when you search for Tones the search is limited to only Tones that are within whatever Category (e.g. E.Piano) and sub-category (e.g. E.Piano1) you are in. The compartmentalization of Tones is not helpful when searching.

The last category in the drop down menu is All Category, which as the name suggests contains tones from all categories. There is no dedicated category button for it. However, if you double-tap the ASSIGN category button, then you can quickly switch to All Category.

[EvereadyBro]

Thank you XP.

I did know about the star rating system and have used it a little, but I didn't know about "All Category." That will be very helpful when searching for Tones when I don't know which Category the desired Tone is in.

Dennis B.

[daniel-pl]

Number 2 is fixed, I think. You can choose "All category" from the drop down, then searching will go thru complete patch list.