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So recently I've been jamming with my friends regularly, at the corner of the office, at a studio, basically just getting any chance to play outside my room. I've been tied to a pc so long, either with fun work or commercial work, that this whole "portable" thing seems really fresh to me.

I realized that my nord 73 was minimally portable, so I brought that to the office. Then I bought me a tiny Roland microcube amp. Works quite well with the rhodes on the nord.

Then I got the micron.. now I got a rhythm section and bass! Got me a tiny mixer, and so now I can mix the micron and the nord, and output it through the puny microcube. The sound sucks like hell, but it's fun.

As I started playing outside, it quickly became apparent to me that there is a big hole in the market right now. It's right where Clavia sits. Simple, self contained machines that are portable, and won't look too geeky besides a great looking guitar / bass. Keyboards seem so "studio" designed. Most of them take too long to change settings, and in the end, looks too plastic-ish and breakable. (truth!) I think the aesthetics of the band is more "machine" than "plastic". That's where clavia's stuff hits straight on the spot. There are many VA and analogue synths that are going in this direction, but none of the rompler/61 key cheap synths.

I think the days of synthesizers being a well built piece of machinery will return, creating a nitch in the market that's currently teeming with super programmed hyper computer machines. (plenty of powerhouse workstations out there) Not to put the super computers down, they're cool in the studio and all, just not for the jamming context. Not portable, and not solid enough to compete against a guitar. We need more muscle, exoskeleton, and less brains.

Dunno, maybe it's that I want a keyboard that really feels like you have an "instrument" in your hand. Not some piece of generic electric circuitry that looks like a space shuttle control console.

The GEM Equinox 88 pro that I have is built like a tank and weighs probably about the same, too. There used to be a 61 unweighted key version of it as well, but I don't know if it was a metal housing like the bigger one. However, the engine has plenty of power (2x64 voices, 3 or 2+2 FX) and offers quite a depth of sound design options to fiddle with if you have the nerve to program it through the small display and all the menues, while the physical controls are narrowed down to just a few of the more important ones. It can hold abundant numbers of presets so you should have an answer to whatever style is being thrown at you. It has never been a very popular synth, but it would have had all the potential that you asked for, I guess. It's a totally different thing than the clavia stuff, though, and the controls don't feel as sweet, but they do their job just fine.