"but what the Audya can't do (as you somewhat dismissively pointed out at the end) is take a groove you DO like, and play it on anything else."
Not completely true. The above only applies to the audio parts of a style. But with the MIDI part, you can keep the groove and change the sound.

But, to a large extent, the drum part IS the groove. It lays down the foundation, the 'pocket' of the entire style. Change that, and you have changed the entire style. Leave it alone, and you can only make superficial differences to the style (nice though they might be).

I understand (although, at this point, it is difficult to tell whether the Audya's OS is ready for this use or not) how easy it is to change the MIDI data (bet it isn't anywhere NEAR as easy as my G70 makes it, though!) in a style. But when the drums, percussion and guitar Parts (and maybe the bass part, too) are all done in audio, well, that's a pretty significant amount of the foundation of the style that you can't do a damn thing to other than change it wholesale for something else.

One of the things I like is to take a style for a song that is fairly high energy, and merely by substituting brush drums for rock, upright for electric bass, jazz or nylon for electric guitar, you can still perform the same piece with the same kind of groove, but all of a sudden, you can perform it for a cocktail audience, or early evening before the energy sets in. In fact, the Roland Cover Tools makes this an almost one button task for the entire style.

Substituting one sticks groove for another doesn't really accomplish the same thing, IMO.

[This message has been edited by Diki (edited 10-07-2009).]

frankie what are your thoughts on os3?

... but in OS 3.0A, you do have a new drum bank (MIDI) which mirrors the AUDIO drums (however, you loose that live 'punch' and feeling only realized with audio) and here is how easy it is to do the switch/changes ...

1. Select the style (as you would with any arranger).
2. Select STYLE - VIEW (which now displays from F1-F10 the entire style parts - 2 Drums, Bass, 2 Lower/Left voices, Chords 1-5).
3. Select the part you want to change (in this case Drum1 or Drum2. It becomes highlighted waiting for your change.
4. While it is highlighted, turn the data wheel to scroll through the current bank (audio or midi - whatever it is now currently in) or press F1 to toggle to the next bank and turn wheel to scroll through Midi or press F1 again to toggle and turn wheel to scroll through USER AUDIO drums. The style can be playing when scrolling/searching through Midi drums but must be stopped to scroll through Audio.
5. If you want to change any of the chord parts, the above process is the same.
6. Like what you hear? Simply press SAVE - the style is automatically copied and saved in the HD USER STYLE folder. The ROM style remains un-altered!!

Hope this make it clearer.

Thanks,

AJ

OK, that makes it VERY much clearer. Outstanding!

Be interesting to hear comparisons between the audio version and the MIDI version, then perhaps some kit changes to show what variety you can get from this...

Things keep getting better and better with the Audya.

To be honest, though, especially with drums (although guitars are getting closer, too), I STILL don't really see the point of audio drums. If you listen to the audio demos for things like EZ Drummer and BFD, etc., it can be almost impossible to tell that it isn't a REAL drummer in audio. It sounds live, it sounds ambient, it sounds real. BUT.... you still can do all the standard MIDI stuff to it. All we need are ROM kits in the sizes that EZ Drummer uses (in fact, they could be MUCH smaller, because you don't need the independent 'overhead' and 'room' mike layers that these give you) and audio loops could be unnecessary.

In fact, do this, and you open up much more data streaming capabilities to the audio guitars (don't need it for the drums any more), and you might finally have the throughput to REALLY get all the guitar chords in realtime...

Once keyboards have the processing power to do what melodyne direct note access does, just think how few audio loops it would actually take to get other chords. You could record maj, and get min, sus easily, and probably aug too. Then you could have more than enough room to make all the extended chords, or just a few of them. like if you make maj 9, min 9 could easily be achieved in the software. And that's the day I'll buy an arranger with audio loops.

Melodyne isn't even a realtime process on the fastest computers you can buy nowadays... Plus, I'm sorry, but despite the impressive demos, it is still no magic bullet to change anything into anything else. You'll notice the demos use VERY clean, very simple sounds as sources. Feed it something more complex, and it has a hard time.

We've got several generations of computers and audio hardware to go through before this is even possible on a TOTL mutiprocessor computer. So that would mean another five or ten years before an arranger gets anywhere NEAR that power on board!

Dream on...

More complex than what? An audio guitar loop isn't so complex that it can't be done. It is being done. It's just as likely that this technology will be available as soon as or sooner than the gigs upon gigs of streaming memory that it would take to do all the chords for all the styles as actual audio.
BTW, have you worked with the new DNA to see how limited it actually is? Have you seen or heard any user demonstrations of it not working very well?
Melodyne can pretty much do it in realtime. You can play a polyphonic piece of audio and change the notes of it via midi keyboard in realtime. Yeah, Melodyne has to take an initial look at the audio first, but that could be done in the arranger too, so it already has looked at all of the audio loops and knows what's in them when the unit ships, so then it can just start doing its thing as you play.

Sure, it won't be in the next generation arranger, but I'd rather see things go that direction than try to get players to record actual audio of every chord type imaginable for every style, and still try to make it musical.

How long ago was it that we were impressed with Vienna orchestral having the ability to do realistic glisses, slides, even note to note transitions? And now we have super articulation 3 built into a keyboard that is doing just that. 5 or 10 years sounds about right.

The guitar and Rhodes demos for Melodyne are extremely clean. Little in the way of distortion, pick noises, scrapes, thumps, all those things that can confuse pitch analyzers...

And yes, we use it at the studio, and it's MUCH less easy than the demos make it out.

Do YOU have it yet? How well does it work for you?

But you are right. I hadn't considered that the analyzing could be done in advance with an arranger. Bet you it's at least fifteen years or more before it becomes a reality for arrangers (if ever), though.

I'm on a 3 week gig, so I haven't tried it yet. Then, in my case, there is always the problem of is it accessible. I've been able to use Melodyne with some degree of success, but this new editor with the polyphonic capabilities might turn out to be very blind unfriendly. We shall see.