I think for that kind of stuff, you might be better served with perhaps a Korg M3 (or M50 if on a budget) or Yamaha MotifXS6, that kind of thing. They still have chord following, but their soundsets and synth engines are MUCH more contemporary that just about any arranger...

Plus they have full featured samplers with beat detection and slicing, so you COULD sample the grooves from the legacy gear and then time correct it.

Arrangers, on the whole, tend to be more 'bread and butter' than what you are doing, and this dark stuff seems to be more arpeggio driven that style driven. I think, if you put a LOT of work in yourself, maybe a Korg PA800 might get the job done, but I still think a WS would be a better fit...

You might also wish to investigate Band-In-A-Box http://pgmusic.com/ Some recent versions support and contain VSTs and is chord based.
Fantastic program for a reasonable output of money.

You can sample on the Genesys. But you would want to get the Genesys S or the XP.

You can include those samples in styles or sequences. And when you turn off the keyboard and turn it back on, the sampled sounds would still be there.

You can even store the sampled sounds on the Hard drive or on CD.

But it doesn't support custom samples, or does it? That's definitively a requirement. I'm not too interested in preset voices or styles, however contemporary they may be -- I wanna make my own sounds.



Yes, the Genesys is an interesting piece of hardware. Just as I started getting interested in arrangers, a Genesys appeared on German Ebay. It went for just 550 Euro (about 800 US-$?)... I was really thinking of bidding, but then this is still a lot of money... I guess I'll have a look at some cheaper solutions. Or maybe just go on with multitracking on Cool Edit. Well, we'll see.