1. Pop 1

it was ok. Dont know what effect Magic Alfa had on the rythm guitar but it didnt sound right to me but thats just personal taste.
It was a solid basic style but clearly a home made style (and i mean no disrespect to Magic)

2.Style funky

Liked the accoustic guitar initially. The style is fine but a couple of the chord changes showed that the wrong NTT had been used. Listen to bass line move in the style. This was a good start and a basic style but i liked it but again , not a yamaha or korg killer and I did not expect it to be . However these two styles could have been made on practically any arranger and sounded just as good.

3. House style

This one was my favourite . I can tell Magic had a ball putting it together. sounded great and was well balnaced but i doubt you could play this style with more than two chords. This is a great example of the Qranger (correct me if i am wrong Magic) however its patchwork music. Cutting and pasting grooves from a sound library into a pattern . cant play complex chiors with it . Same problem with the Audy. it is just a step up from plugging in an ipod and making your own mix tape (now i am showing my age) :-)

These are good user demos and Magic is clearly having fun with his instrument and i cant and wont knock that. all i would say is that all the tools, features and gimmicks that are being stuffed into the MS simply underline the point that what it really needs is goods styles and there is no running away from it.

Actually Spalding you are wrong about
"Cutting and pasting grooves from a sound library into a pattern . cant play complex chiors with it"

If the loop is a C13 for example, the Audio Elastique engine changes the pitch whilst the style is running...Play G and it transposes to a G13, play a D and it transposes to a D13...ALL in realtime.

Magica is far FAR more experienced in this than I am so he may be able to explain it better, but it is nowhere near an Audya in its complexity and how it works.

It is way AHEAD of the Audya when it comes to dealing with audio samples and loops.

Dennis

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[This message has been edited by AFG Music (edited 03-06-2010).]

maybe i have got it wrong then Miden . My understanding was that the Qranger could stretch the range of the note but not alter the chord so for instance, if i past a guitar riff that is playing say a Dminor 9th chord and i play an F Major 7th chord the Qranger would stretch the chord to Fminor 9th but could not morph or mimick the F major 7th ??? is my understanding correct ?

Thats why i said that the style could not play complex chords meaning the chords i play not the chords the original audio was recorded as playing. Sorry if the statement was inaccurate.

Can anyone email these to me. For some reason (probably that I have a somewhat older computer and not the latest OSX) my browser won't play esnips content.

However, I have always been aware that you can do loop construction with the MS. But, as spalding points out, that is a LONG way from being an 'arranger'. In fact, it is much more like WS's currently are. For trance styles, and hiphop, with their limited chord needs, this is cool. But try to play Desafinado on ANY of these types of things...! OK, that's an extreme example, but really... the whole POINT of an arranger and styles is to be able to play any music you want to on a style that you pick. Not have the style as the song itself, and IT picks what you can and can't play on it.

One of the HUGE drawbacks with transposing a loop, as opposed to a MIDI arranger playing a different chord, is that, with the loop, EVERYTHING gets transposed identically. There are no 'wraparound' points for different sounds, there are no different NTT's for guitar chords, there are no rules to prevent a bassline (or any instrument) from going outside it's natural range... As long as you stick to synth sounds, this is not such a big deal. But real instruments, playing real music ( ), don't behave at all like this.

Modern MIDI arrangers have all kinds of sophisticated algorithms to stop the 'parallel chords' problem, and keep getting better and better at programming realistic playing techniques such as voice leading and inversion following, some guitar modes recognize where in the chord recognition area you are playing your trigger chord, and adjust the chord's inversion on the virtual guitar neck. Loops can't do ANY of this stuff. But it merely takes better and better sampled instruments to take these into near totally convincing country, and you get all the advantages of a loop (realism... that's about it!) with none of it's disadvantages (which are legion).

A loop is a loop is a loop. You can change it's pitch (globally) and you can speed it up or down. But you can't do a FRACTION of what you can do to a MIDI loop...

For people that play synth music, trance, techno, hiphop, rap, the MS looper tools seem great. But at real music played on real instruments, it still, IMO has a LONG way to go to beat MIDI.falls short

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[This message has been edited by AFG Music (edited 03-06-2010).]

Sorry Spalding I did misunderstand, yes what you say there is accuarate it will stretch the chord, but it will still be the same chord type and inversion.

But I suppose if someone is willing to put in a chord (remember its all in C usually) that covers the major and minor forms, prob 5 would be enough for most songs, you could get more complex chordal recognition using audio.

I am just starting to experiment with audio styles now, so I may have some results in a couple of weeks.

Dennis

Edited to add: Yes Magicas explanation there is perfect. Shoudl make it a lot clearer. Better than I could

So to add to mine, if you dont want to stretch chords you can save WITH the style every realtime guitar chord you want to use.

I think basslines are nto as important to use audio for as you can get very realistic and genuine bass lines using midi to drive the sampler.

For me the ability to have REAL guitars happening in styles is what I really want.

I can play enough in the keys area to cover all of that as I can have several VST's layered and playing at the same time on the MS using the Combi mode. These I can play along wiht the style.

No note limitations yet Diki and NO dropouts audio OR note...my max Combi layer so far is 4 instruments.

[This message has been edited by miden (edited 06-09-2009).]

Thanks for that Miden. So what Magic Alpha is saying if i undersatnd him correctly is that for each style in the Qranger that you create you will have to paste in very conceviable chord lets say for the rythm guitar and the same again for lets say your horn section and then the same again for your organ and then repeat the whole excersise again for each style variation if you want the style to recognise every chord ????? So you would need to find a guitar loop for every chord using the same to make the sound seem audibly seamless ?
How is that different to what the Audya has done or is trying to do ???? It has taken the Audya 3 or more years to get here with a whole production team behind it. How long would it take one musician to just make 50 good styles that would work no matter what chord type you threw at it ??????? Or have i completely misunderstood you magic Alpha ?

I have the PA1X. If i wanted to i could create the 1st style variation by recording each instrument into one Chord Variation (CV) and have different chord recognistion types per instrument in that one CV. So for example i can programme a guitar riff in CV1 that only triggers when i play a dimished chord. in CV2 I can programme a different guitar riff that only triggers when i play a Minor 9th chord. I can have horn stabbs that only trigger when i paly any 13th chord . I can keep doing this for up to 6 CV and thats only for the 1st style Variation (i can have up to 4 complete style variations for each complete style excluding fillins,breaks endings and intro's. Thats the level of depth i could go into in making a style. But for most styles i only use 2 CVs because the keyboard will play quite happily most chord types correctly.But by programming this way i can creat a feeling of liveness in a style by simply playing different chords to trigger a different feel to the music. It takes skill but thats why i dont change keyboard often so i can really dig into its features. Lots of style making is intuitive and a great deal of trial and error but for the most part the skill needed to creat great styles is hugely underestimated.

[This message has been edited by spalding1968 (edited 06-09-2009).]

I think Spalding that once the guitar chords were recorded you would store them on the hard drive and simply paste them in for whatever future style you were creating.

For close chords where the pitch change is minor (read small) you could use a fixed chord and let the Elastique engine transpose for you, for bigger jumps wehere we know audio gets to "chipmunky" and faster, you could paste in your specific chord.

So yes it would take some time to get the chords recorded tweaked and saved to the hard drive, but after that placing them in styles would be relatively easy....

By the way I have to be honest and say that is supposition at this stage by me based on my knowledge at this time.. Maybe Magica can provide some more REAL experience to the discussion.

But I will say that as we all know some styles are very simple and will only require maybe 4 chord variations, others are more complex.

The beauty of the MS system is you can set up whatever you want in whatever style you want.

I actually mucked around with an MP3 song in the Qranger and inserted markers at the change points and named them variation 1,2 etc..and I was able to recall this "style" via the style engine playing the song live as it were.

Now it it was a bit glitchy between parts but that was because I did not slice the MP3 at all, I just loaded it up raw and assigned markers. But it does show what can be done.

I reckon you could record audio parts of a specific song, as seperate audio samples and then assign these to parts and I think you would get a pretty good result.

The thing with the MS is there is so much a user CAN do.. A users imagination is pretty much the limit really. And their willingness for a bit of work will help too

Dennis

yes Miden i am sure what you are saying is true but the whole point of an arranger is that i can use the same style for pretty much ANY SONG and not just specifically for one song.

For example i work with a few choirs at my church. We might sing a particular song in a slow balad style . Some madness might take me (its been known to happen :-)) and i decide to speed the song up and use a funk groove style , i can do that instantly with my PAX. Now lets say the choir are really feeling the style and we jump to a completely different song same key but with completely different chord changes, how would i do this with the Qranger and using markers ????? I can understand how i could use that in a studio where i have ample time to decide what fits where but not live . Do you see my point ?