WDMcM,

Since most of us haven't heard or seen any of the GEM products please join us for the jam session in Shreveport LA the weekend of April 28th.

Tom

Spalding,
Your post is right on the mark...pro arranger users are a very small portion of the market.
Ian

Great idea, Tom!
Dave, email me for specifics.
DonM

I am not sure I agree exactly with that statement since many of the members of this forum using arranger instruments consider themselves professionals. But I think I know what you mean. However, remember that this is mostly true of the American market only. In Europe and other countries, the use of top end professional arranger/workstations is much more prevalent.

Dave

If there was any way I could be there I would. But if for no other reason, my son's 3rd birthday is April 29th and needless to say I will not be leaving home of gigging during that time.

Thanks for the offer though.

Dave

Three years ago I commented there are maybe what two, three, four hundred maybe 2000 members here on the forum, give or take a couple of thousand. And really, how many actually makes any money playing professionally?

I bet we have 10,000 keyboards or pianos of some sort in homes in this area of maybe 120,000 people. Maybe 50,000 homes have one in the house. Perhaps 5 or 10 maybe 20 made a nickel playing somewhere sometime. Why I bet there's 500,000 guitars in homes in this valley.

Spalding you're right on the money. Multiply all of this by 6 billion peoples all over the world. Pro keyboard players are a drop in the bucket market wise when it comes to designing and building equipment. I don't care how many keyboards you big time pros buy in a year. Ha! Ha! Maybe you'd have some pull if you bought one a week or every other day. Sorry friends it's just the way the cookie crumbles.
There's a possibility we're wasting our breath. Save it for vocals.

I might just as well voice my wants.

1. Weight 10lbs
2. 61 keys are enough
3. I can live with most of the sounds now available
4. I want every available Jazz, Swing, 50's, 60’s Rock & Roll, and Blues styles that are the very best available from every manufacture’s keyboards today on this unit.
All it would take is a bigger computer chip, No? I mean the plastic, metal; rubber is all the same, No?

Marketing, they want you to keep buying. I’ll say it again. It doesn’t seem to be getting through. It’s great for the economy and sucks for the consumer! It’s what makes the world go round. It's the system.

Do I need a prescription for Prozac? Maybe I need to start drinking? Wish Gary were here. I'd have him send me some of that Kickapoo juice.

Maybe on my next gig, I'll just do "Darn That Dream", "All The Things You Are", "Perdido"
"What's New" and screw "Crazy", "All My X's Live In Texas" and so forth. Then I won't need to worry about upgrading my i30. Heck I won't even need it.

So I guess this professional was just Dreaming?

I agree 100%!!

As professional players we want something that we can stay familiar with (that is the keybed and button layout) and still can up grade the features without buying a new system.

Desk top computers, lap top computers and PDAs are doing that. And they are still coming out with new hardware products which people are buying.


If Ketron can make the midjay only 7LBs (which has all the computer componants of the keyboard) there is no reason why arranger manufacturers can not make a 76 key arranger that is less than 30LBS.

The reasoning that we should settle for 61 keys even if we really want 76 keys shows how much work we have to do so that arranger manufacturers would start making arrangers with our needs.

I just hope they don't take that reasoning and start making 49 key arrangers and say 61 would be nice but you can do with just 49.

Its time for arranger manufacturers to stop saying how hard it is to make arrangers, and start making arrangers with features that professionals need.

To the genesis:

I fully agree with your sentiment. My ideal form factor would be 76 (or even 73) keys with small speakers (for personal monitoring and low-volume practice), weighing under 35 lbs. Forget floppy disks - just give us USB A and B ports to connect thumb-drives or external USB devices. A hard drive would be useful, but not necessary.

Instead of saying how hard it is to make arrnagers, the manufacturers should do things right the first time - it will cost them much less in the long run.

I think Roland and Korg (and perhaps others) should take their que from Yamaha - they have developed a good operating system some 10 years ago, and it remains basicaly unchanged from PSR 7000. A Yamaha player would find his way around Tyros2 as easily as around PSR3000. By reusing their good operating system, Yamaha is able to derive higher profits from each unit sold. Even if the improvement is only in the quality of sounds and styles (forgetting the goofy corners on T2), the low learning curve makes it easy to upgrade. I bet if Roland (and Korg) were not trying to nickel-and-dime the users by saving a few buttons, and had reused the OS of E70 (the most user-friendly Roland ever built - remember it way back from 1991 ?), it would have cost them a lot less to roll out each new model, and keeping customers happy, they'd be able to sell a lot more instruments. Similarly, Korg should have kept the user-friendliness of I30 in its PA series.

Regards,
Alex

Boy I see how passionate this topic really is .....& I hope the manufacturers are reading these posts also, it's all we can do to keep plugging along repeating our wishlists, showing our dismay or agreement buy sales, we must also consider this topic as a broader WORLDWIDE user issue because eveyone wants & needs something different for the msuic they make....
but after a while you can start seeing by average majority requests....what most people want in a KB.....eventually somethings gotta give...I Hope