You can say it as many times as you want, but the WS does NOT have fills like an arranger. In an arranger, you hit for the fill any time you want it, and it drops in, in perfect sync with the beat...

On a loopstation, you HAVE to call the fill up a bar in advance, it takes a FULL bar (or whatever length it is) to play, you can't call the fill up on beats 2 or 3 to make a pickup out of a full fill. You want a pickup, you have to program it up in advance.

Just this ONE glaring omission on contemporary arranger's current capabilities is enough to cripple the WS as a live performance tool. Can you play music with it? Of course. Can you do what YOU want to do, when you want to do it? Not a chance.

Loopstations are VERY good at doing music built completely around the loops. Once you decide to go with what they do, rather than what you might WANT to do, they are fine. But, personally, I prefer a machine that does what I want it to do, when I want it to do it, and with a minimum of interruption to my playing. Making the triggering of loops as complicated as a WS makes it is all well and good for the guys you see hardly PLAYING anything, choosing to make their creative input the controlling of the loops (more DJ-ing than playing, IMO), but if you want to PLAY, and don't want a machine to dictate to you what you can and can't do (and when you can and can't do it), these loop playing WS's are a VERY poor substitute for an arranger.

Once again, I REALLY encourage you to actually try this stuff for yourself in a live situation BEFORE you start to make judgments about it. It SEEMS like it (the WS) ought to be able to be an adequate substitute for an arranger, but I have actually tried (and several others here, too) and I find it somewhat insulting to hear our actual practical experienced dismissed so casually, by someone that it is utterly obvious they have never actually tried it themselves...

The devil is in the details. To be honest, you could take a first generation arranger and make music. And it would STILL probably be easier than trying to play live on a WS with it doing chord following accompaniment. Twenty years ago, with sufficient time, I could do home production music that comes fairly close to what I can do now... but it got a LOT easier, so I don't use the gear from twenty years ago. And modern WS's are about twenty years old in their chord following and live accompaniment generation capabilities. So yes, you CAN use them. But WHY..?!

Take a MoXS to a gig before you tell us how easy it all is, eh? You know, like some of us already HAVE