Quote:
Originally posted by Tom NL:
I asked the Roland demonstrator about this.
When you select "auto fill in" you will get a break/fill-in when you switch "up" to the next variation.

So 1st to 2nd is the first fill in, 2nd to 3rd the second etc. It does this also when selecting a "lower" variation, so from 4th to 3rd is the fourth fill-in, from 3rd to 2nd the fifth, etc. It also does a break/fill-in when you hit the button of your current variation.

BTW, the four variation buttons also trigger the four intro's and endings. Intro one is just drums, and probably the one you will use a lot if you want to use a programmed intro. Intro two is an interesting one. This one has no chord progression, but is created to enable you to play your your own chords during the intro, thus making the intro blend much better with the song.

I hope I explained it ok, because English is not my native language.



Hmmmmmm. Interesting - and thanks for the excellent explanation.

Whether what Roland have done here is adequate or not, only practical testing will reveal. My initial reaction is that it sounds unnecessarly limited.

Again, the old Korg i3 got this right over 10 years ago. You could set up either of it's break buttons independantly to go to a choice of main style variations at will. Either button could be set to return to the same variation, go up one, go down one, jump to a specific one, or toggle between any chosen two. The settings were specific to each break button, and could be different for each stored song patch.

That, plus the chord mapping feature which meant that you could have up to four totally different breaks under each break button per style (one of which, for example, you could set so it would only be triggered if you played a flattened 10th demented chord) gave you huge control over the arranger section.

Same thinking was true of the main style variations, which actually had up to six "shades" under each one, triggered by chord type. This went far beyond the ususal major, minor, seventh recognition. You could freely pick which "shade" was triggered for somthing like 32 recognizable chord types, per variation, per style. Again - these could all be stored differently for each song, so two songs which happened to use the same basic style could be made to behave quite differently.

I haven't seen the job done fundamentally better than this on any make of arranger before or since.

This is the sort of thing I was meaning when I mentioned in an earlier post about the importance of getting the basics of an instrument right, before adding all the "fairy dust" novelty features.

Regards - Mike