Well, I imagine that the guys at Yamaha, Roland and Korg who code the OS doesn't design the styles either. The thing is, they hire a team of VERY talented style makers to do it for them, and the cost of doing this is defrayed by the retail price of the arranger.

If you have no time or inclination to design the styles yourself (and, to be honest, few of the Big 3's styles are done solely by one person, anyway, from what we are told), you need to hire someone to, at the very LEAST, tweak all the Yamaha and Roland styles to be shown to their best, and preferably, hire a style design team (or get MidiSpot or one of the other TOTL style makers to work for you) and design styles expressly for the best included sound set and VSTi's. Then, just like all the other manufacturers, you defray the cost of this into the total cost of the arranger, and finally you have something that the 99% of the arranger market (you know, the ones that DON'T make their own styles, no matter how much you WISH they would ) would be willing to buy.

Of course, this will bring up the price of the unit cost, but at least you wouldn't be missing the mark with the vast majority of arranger users that want to just PLAY, not spend AT LEAST 20 minutes (in real life, more like an hour for the average home user) on each and every style that's in it before it even sounds as good as an S900. 300 hours of style editing before you get something as balanced as a $1600 arranger... 7 1/2 WEEKS of a 40 hour week Two MONTHS of non-stop editing to get a measly 300 styles working!

So now we know why you haven't done this yourself (yet alone actually CREATE a style!)... And, truth is, none of us have a couple of months to devote to style editing before we can even use your arranger, either. If you haven't worked out by yet that the VAST majority of arranger buyers will NEVER spend that kind of time on editing and tweaking, you simply have done NO market research.... Rikki's style-MAKING group turned out that only 1% of THEM (a tiny percentage themselves of the overall arranger users group) actually made styles. How big a clue do you need...?

You are, in effect, trying to sell a computer that uses a non-standard OS, and trying to persuade people to buy it by saying that they will have to write their own programs Now maybe for YOU (as a code geek) this sounds like fun. Try it in the general population...

No, you already know this. We know this. Everybody knows this... How come you don't know what WE know, though? Without a HUGE library of already well-balanced styles and sounds, you are making a niche product for a tiny minority, and the minute the majors release an 'open' arranger (an inevitability, sooner or later) they will NOT ignore the content, and you will be GONE... If you tackle this now, you have a head start. If you don't, the first competitor that does will give you a VERY hard time.

I have said all along that I like the concept of your product. But the execution stinks. If all the cutting edge features were added to an already well-balanced arranger, I would be playing it already (and you would have my money and support, like Roland have now). But cutting edge features on an unusable (without MONTHS of tweaking at best) arranger will never persuade me, and the vast majority of arranger users. I sincerely wish you could see this, rectify the problem, so I could buy one

Hi Dom,
I definately enjoy experimenting, I have lots of spare time, and luv learning .
For 5 years I spent most of my spare time with my head buried in a manual, Roland, Korg, Technics, Yamaha, Ensoniq, Kurzweil.
Spent a week studying the Roland W30 manual just so I could give a 1 hr demo at a school , because the young keyboard salesman at the music store wasn't game to front a class of 40, 17 year olds girls.
Not profitable,but at least I didn't have to buy a W30 to quench my curiosity about it. Same can't be said for the other 30 to 40 synths, workstations, samplers , soundmodules, arrangers I've owned..

The only thing I'm not quite sure of , is if I'd have the technical skills to actually edit ?? the giga samples.
Knowing how to do something, doesn't neccesarily mean you end up with a perfect result.

I've known the technical side of creating styles for all the brands of keyboards I've owned, but knowing how to is not the same as being able to compose& get the balance right etc, all the stuff Diki mentioned.

I put styles together, I give them away, if they can use them great, if not , I'm non the wiser. A lot of the stuff I write about & do is in the hope of getting others involved in trying to create styles for their keyboards.

I may be in the same situation with trying to put the Giga Soundbank together.

Editing the soundfonts was one thing, I just chose individual fonts that were the closest I thought to the psr sounds & organized them into banks. Rearranged some drum sounds to suit the psr's drum mapping etc. I've no experience as far as megavoices go either.
I kept my PSR1500 & SD1, even though my latest toy is the Korg PA800.

Another problem could be, I'm in Australia.
Not sure whether you even distribute here??

I wouldn't want to take something on under false pretenses.


[QUOTE]Originally posted by LIONSTRACS:
[B] Rikki


[This message has been edited by rikkisbears (edited 06-26-2008).]