Mimik is NOT the answer to anyone's desire to sound BETTER than a closed arranger. Simply copying the sounds, so that the styles can finally play correctly is an insane solution. All along, for ever, since DAY 1 of the launch of the MS, it's protagonists have CLAIMED (and as of yet, utterly failed to prove) that the MS will sound BETTER than a closed arranger. The thought that you have to clone a closed arranger to sound better is idiocy at its' most obvious. Only with the greatest attention to detail will the MS ever sound even IDENTICAL, and even James should be ashamed to suggest it. He well knows that sampling a sound that also uses envelopes and LFO, pitch transposition will munchkinize those sounds into something different, and lesser, to be frank.

But the very fact that this Mimik solution is even SUGGESTED by MS users just goes to show how completely incapable of bettering the closed arranger sound with the solution that is obvious in the first place, simply using better quality VSTi's...

Once again, I draw attention to the fact that modern arrangers have gone FAR beyond GM. Non-standard drum maps, extensive variations on the capitol sounds - none of these modern extensions to the old way of doing things is even mentioned by those that think (but so far have failed to provide acceptable example of) replacing a modern arranger's sounds is EASY. Instead they trot out the tired and patently idiotic solution of actually cloning the closed arranger's sounds!

There are probably at least half a dozen GREAT guitar sounds, and possibly more, in any closed arranger, just in the steel guitar section. Suggesting that ONE good steel guitar GM GIGA sound is going to adequately replace ALL of them is absurd. They each have a different sound and function, and the designers of the style took its' sound into account as they made the style. Look, it isn't always easy to substitute one guitar for another even within the SAME soundset of just one arranger. As I keep trying to point out (and no-one apparently has any kind of response for), the sound ITSELF dictates the performance. Any of you out there with any decent chops whatsoever will acknowledge that you play and respond to different patches, even of the same basic sound, quite differently. A change in velocity to filter response, or of sample crossover points, or of basic release or attack envelopes will ALL make you play somewhat differently. This is at the crux of why styles don't translate well. Change the sound, you often need to change the PERFORMANCE, too.

But all that is being suggested is to cobble ONE GIGA sound to replace several, and best of jolly good luck if it matches the intention of the style performer..!

This, gentlemen, at least in MY book, is completely insufficient, and at the root of why pretty much all the style conversions from the MS I have ever heard suck. To be fair, it's the same reason why even closed arrangers (who at least start out with a balanced full soundset) seldom manage to equal the original arranger's style. The sound IS the performance. And cloning a sound to make an acceptable translation is stupid. Why ever would one clone a closed arranger (at considerable effort, I might add) when you could simply buy the closed arranger far less expensively in the first place..?!

I am getting almighty tired of listening to those that don't even USE their MS in arranger mode keep trying to tell us how easy something is to do that it is patently obvious they have yet to try. As I keep asking (and I never get), why don't those of you that SAY it is so easy provide us with example after example, not excuse after excuse...?