Bill, sorry, but it makes NO SENSE whatsoever buying an open arranger, then using closed arranger samples just so styles translate. I've already GOT something that sounds just as good as a G70.... TWO G70's!

The whole POINT of an open arranger is to use sounds that are BETTER than what you already have. If you have to clone an arranger's sounds (or its' equivalent WS) just to make translations work, might as well use the original!

I'm talking about BFD-like quality drums. Not someone's half-arsed attempt at cloning some other keyboard's drumkit...

Thing that worries me so much is how 'theoretical' everyone's answers are... it seems only too apparent that no-one, despite some of you having had an MS for quite some time, has actually got around to really DOING any of this stuff. You would have thought, by now, that someone would have said 'yes, I translate a LOT of T3, PA2X, E80 etc. styles, here's how I do the mapping, and here's what they sound like... amazingly better than the original, no?' but all anyone offers is a 'you OUGHT to be able to do it like this...' but no-one seems to have DONE IT.

Just once, I'd like an MS user to speak from actual experience. Seems like nobody has ever tried to make the MS live up to its' 'potential', simply content to crow about the potential without finding out for themselves what level of workload achieving this 'potential' actually is...

The whole thought of using a GM soundset is so utterly laughable, I have no idea why anyone offers it. Even a quite modest arranger nowadays doesn't have just ONE sound under the capital PC#. You look in the PC#5, there isn't ONE Rhodes sound. There are dozens of different ones. You look under PC#66, there isn't ONE alto sax, there are dozens of them. All different. There are dozens of different drumkits. And, if the styles are well made, they use all these different sounds. And trying to replace them with just ONE Giga GM sound is not going to make a translation work very well. The original style creator played one sax sound completely differently to another (he did if he's any good, anyway!), and running them through the same sound is going to compromise his performance.

Any soundbank used to run the style section on the MS had better be as varied and well programmed as the original you are trying to translate, otherwise you end up with (as I have heard on pretty much most of the translated styles I've heard) basically a pretty poor substitute for the real thing. Sure, the individual sounds MIGHT be a bit better, but the whole thing doesn't hang together, and just basically sounds cobbled together, which the original, for all its' lesser sounds, certainly DOESN'T...