great all in one keyboard, great for solo performers

The best piano sounds you will find for anything under 1 grand, piano sounds come from fantom G boards. 256 Megabytes of high quality wave data, most of them are great.usb player, fully arranger function, good synth features as well. Lightweight, good construction and roland quality, keys are not the best, but feel good.
Brass section is impressive, pads, drums are very good, guitar(strings) voices respond to velocity.

one of the best keyboard i ever had

excellent synthesizer

know what you want / need

The reviews on this keyboard are all over the map. People either love it or hate it. So what's up with all that? First this keyboard has many great sounds on-board. People saying the piano sounds are no good ~ I don't find that to be the case and I've owned/played Steinway'/Hammond/Rhodes/etc and the GW-8 has a big full sound set. As far as the key action goes - this is a synth and has a nice synth action. It's not a stage piano - it won't have a piano action or feel like a piano.

I bought this board to use in a duo. I wanted a board with quality sounds that could do backing tracks if needed. It needed to be light and easy to use. I demoed this board and a Yamaha PSR710 and I decided on the Roland because it was easier to use (way less buttons) and didn't have built-in speakers.

The board is a lot of fun to work with and the controls are actually laid out well. I didn't need the manual to get up and running. Go to YouTube and listen to some of the demos. For the $ this board has hundreds of great sounds, is easy to setup, can provide backing tracks and has a nice synth action. Do your homework and know what you're looking for - this a decent synth/workstation/arranger board and for the $ is a good value.

Not Much better for recording

Sound quality of GW8 is OK. But when we go little deep Song recording is very difficult. Because we cannot use a tone from our favorite bank. That means we have to record each part with built in tones (without its effects). This is a great drawback of the kewboard. Roland's support to the customer is very poor.

Why Roland

First the piano sound on this board are plain out horrible,the rhodes are ok organ to. The action makes playing difficult, especially Piano Playing.

Casios have better sounding piano tones

I agree with the previous review. If you never expect to need a good sounding piano, or electric piano, or Hammond organ this is a great synth. And, no, I'm not being facetious. All the other tones and features are great. Personally, I returned this thing as fast as I could. What a shame.