Dave,
One GREAT thing about Korg arrangers,.
Korg DOES NOT consider them HOME keyboards, as you no doubt have been experiencing since you got yours. :-)

Lee S.

Hi Dave,
I tend to think the majority of arranger players are hobbyists like myself.

Personally I don't know how to play drums.
( don't mean physically haahaa I mean drum style patterns)

The way I put styles together is by hearing what I want ie building up from bass & drums, & auditioning assorted style tracks with a song.
Be easier dialing up phrases & auditioning along the way, than using the copy function.
With the copy function you have to leave the style creator to audition the style with the song.

As far as the Technics Easy Composer was concerned, it was really simple to use.
Would not require much studying. Unfortunately I don't think it had the option of auditioning song while in easy composer mode either.

I think it would be handy if there was an easy way to create a style.
We audition styles with songs, why not phrases. Not just for the sake of it, but if an onboard style doesn't suit, try & create one's own.
Doesn't have to be elaborate using 6cv's for each style track, korg does it reasonably well with 1cv, so does yammie.

Anyway, hypothetical, just a bit of a pipe dream of mine.

[QUOTE]

Hi rikki,

Just curious and not trying to be a smart aleck. In the amount of time it takes to scroll through the many solo kick drum, snare, hi hat, bass and chordal phrases and stick them together into something useful, couldn't a person actually create their own personal rhythm and accompaniment tracks? The answer may be "not if the person doesn't know how to play drums". But my thought is in the amount of time spent reading the manual and learning how to use the style creation features, one could just as easily learn how to create their own drum beats, etc. and then have a style that is totally unique.

Dave

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Wm. David McMahan
LearnMyKeyboard
JazzItUp Band
The Modulators

One thing that would help assembling styles out of bits of other styles would be a 'groove extractor' like they have on a lot of MIDI DAW's (and audio, now).

Basically, this would allow you to impose the 'groove' (swing factor, 'feel', whatever you want to call it) from one part (whichever feels best to you), and impose its' feel onto other tracks you import. This would vastly increase the number of style possibilities, IMO...

BTW, anybody miss the old 'swing' knob from the earliest, simplest drum boxes and Rhythm Aces? You could get quite a lot of variety from ONE simple pattern with those...

OMG I can't believe it has been 37 years since I played out with just my B3 and Rythm Ace. They were simpler times when the patrons marveled at the technology.

OK, now I get it. Sort of like folks using Sony Acid to build songs out of individual phrases. That's cool.

Dave

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Wm. David McMahan
LearnMyKeyboard
JazzItUp Band
The Modulators

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Wm. David McMahan
LearnMyKeyboard
JazzItUp Band
The Modulators

Overhere in europe still many childrens first instrument is a low entry level arranger (Yam/casio) and i think that many of them will try and find those feautures in the more professional systems they buy when they get better and older.

Still an arranger using styles is an awesome and easy way the try out new mellodies and musicall ideas even for the pro's

For me the future is clear, people allways want to play around with music at their homes and for them an arranger is a very nice instrument.

Many of the pro's are still looking for the TOTL instrument. For me the TOTL instrument would be a combination of an Arranger and an extended arpegiator like KARMA..... with many different sound sorcess, like OASYS or a mor VST based system.

While home users want/prefer/are used to 61 keys... many of the pro's really love 76 keys for live gigging, So if they really want to make arrangers a gigging choice in the future they should aim more for the stage musicians with their top models instead of for the Home players... and then the home players will just follow.


Arrangers have a future... but wether it will be on stage or only in the living room has to be seen in the next 20 years....

My daughter is loving her rythm piano, while learning piano for 30 mins a day the hard way, she also has 30 minutes of making fun music with the styles on the arranger part, and thats where music is all about having fun... many of the young that play piano loose interest because of the chore... while she keeps having fun because of the ease of the arranger part. Just simple mellodies with simple chords, but they she sounds like a pro...


[This message has been edited by Bachus (edited 08-21-2009).]

Difference is, now WE have become jaded. The patrons still marvel at the technology (if you play it well ), but we no longer gawk and gasp at it, despite it's utterly amazing improvement over those Rhythm Ace days...

Not enough any more, unfortunately. Certainly not enough to replace the ones dropping off the scene at the other end of the demographic scale.