Glad someone else has come upon that one... Fed up of being the only one pointing out potential roadblocks for the arranger player!
MIDI based arrangers for donkey's years have had features that restrict melodic lines (including bass lines) to a specific range. Newer ones will even adjust lines according to inversion played.
But as soon as you convert a style section into a loop, and use audio pitch transposition to change it rather than MIDI, you end up with much greater, often unmusical jumps.
I personally feel there is a fundamental difference between creating music with loops, and with an arranger. In general, when you create music with loops, you create the music AROUND the loops, accept what they can and can't do, and let it go at that. Styles, on the other hand, are used to play music already written, AS WELL as creating original stuff. And the problem with existing music is it takes no notice of whether your loops have all the chords, fills, variations etc., that it actually needs.
Each has it's own legitimate usage, but often shoehorning loops to do what an arranger player often needs is an exercise in frustration, as it is rare to find any loop library with comprehensive chord and extension choices (sound familiar?
) fro importing into your loopstation. And, as is pointed here, even grabbing audio loops from existing arrangers you already have (and what's the point of that if you already have the arranger?
) doesn't solve the pitch transposition issues.
There really IS some very sophisticated stuff going on under the hood of an arranger that currently, no loop technology can copy... or at least not without a herculean sampling effort that basically makes using loops moot. Might as well use the arranger you sample them from!
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