chas, I'm just curious... given your apparent disdain for any use of the arranger in a 'legitimate' context (whatever THAT is!), why do you bother with them at all?

What do you use YOUR arranger for? And, if it is different from the way others might use theirs, do they have the right to call YOUR usage 'HORSESH*T'?

The reason I (and probably many others) use arrangers live is because they are DESIGNED for it. They aren't a studio tool masquerading as a live instrument. You take any major WS out on a 'call' gig (where you have no time in advance to create setups, patches, effects routings, etc.) and it quickly becomes a nightmare to call up splits and layers, with volumes and effects, quickly and efficiently. In the studio, under less time pressure, you can possibly achieve better end results, but find yourself on a gig and a song gets called where you need a steel drum patch layered with a marimba in the right hand, and a Rhodes/B3 layer in the left, with chorus on the Rhodes and a Leslie on the B3, the song will be half over before you have created this on a Motif or Triton.

I can do this in four bars (or less!) on a G70.

Secondly, familiarity with equipment is important on any type of gig. So a TOTL arranger, capable of going from close to WS capabilities in a full band situation (and VASTLY better setup time for patches), through LH bass and RH accompaniment (with the same speed advantage for patch selection in the RH), to LH bass/RH ACC using arranger drums (with their huge improvement over using drum machines with little live control) to full-on arranger accompaniment for the solo act, you only need ONE piece of kit to cover almost ANY situation. One piece of kit equals intimate knowledge of OS and soundset.

So, WHY use an arranger for LH bass gigs? Because I can use it for ALL my other live gigs as well. Unlike a WS, which has no accompaniment abilities at all, unless you pre-program them.

In the REAL world, most gigs are cover gigs of some kind. Very few make any decent kind of a living playing all original music live. Studio, yes, but that requires a whole different toolset to live. The problem is that arranger manufacturers refuse to design arrangers that work well for modern music, despite them STILL being the better tool for it in a live situation. Even hiphop and rap songs still have intros, different variations, breakdowns and, yes, even an ending occasionally...!

But loop based workstations provide little to be able to do this on-the-fly. The idea of IMPROVISING this is somehow thought to be the DJ's domain. Or a guy with a beatbox. But little needs to be done to arrangers to make them far more controllable for this task, AND still be usable as the synth/keyboard part of the music, too. But if arranger designers remain mired in providing auto-accompaniment ONLY for older, demographically less popular styles, they ARE going to go the way of the organ...