Don't apologize for the demo, James. It does more to inform me than anything else I've seen out there, and helps explain your enthusiasm for the system... (Dom's an idiot not to hire you to demo the MS, IMO)

As to no WS user wanting to sound like an arranger, well, we BOTH play acoustic based musics from time to time... I have plenty of WS's, and I wouldn't mind them to be able to do what an arranger does AS WELL as what they do which an arranger can't. I think you just meant they don't want to hear bossa GE's in the standard package We BOTH know an arranger is capable of music FAR outside of that!

I can see how well Karma works given input that is stylistically appropriate to what we want to play, it's a shame they don't want to explore the acoustic side of things better. It might not replace the arranger altogether, but it would certainly give many of us pause when making our next purchasing decision.

You describe how you can take a style from the PA2, and import its' patterns into Karma scenes, and then start to generate variations based on those... have you any audio of you doing that? For anyone coming from the arranger world over to Karma, they are going to need something like that to be relatively easy to do, I would imagine. Most of us use dozens of styles in our live shows (at least!) and the time and effort it would take to make a useful GE out of them would be a factor.

I am definitely starting to see the light (and heard it too - really, the only thing that works with me!) and am getting much more enthusiastic. You see... I'm not impossible to persuade

I wonder why Korg have deliberately chosen to completely ignore musics that would increase sales to a market that is crying out for change, or why they haven't added Karma to the PA line as well as Oasys and M3? The way you demonstrate it, it seems a good musical tool.

If and when you've got the time, anything else non-electronic in nature on your Oasys's Karma would make an excellent addition to that video. We don't need it any slicker or fancy, what you posted was amazingly fast and succinct. Bloody iPhone is amazing! Is Stephen porting Karma to the iPhone next?

I've always said I'm willing to change my opinions if I heard something that supported others' points of view... Now you know I'm good for my word. And others possibly can see how easy it is to do, IF they have something to back their opinion up.

Thank you for taking the time to do this. We could have been here for another eternity arguing back and forth without that simple demo. Maybe next time, you want to make a point, just do the same thing..! I'm hard to TALK out of a viewpoint, but pretty easy to be SHOWN the error of my ways

The damn thing wont play on my computer !!!

Make sure you have the right codecs installed, get a little program called avicodec that will tell you which codecs and where to download them.

Dont try to play the MP4 in your browser but choose to download it.

James, i dont think your efforts are worth anything in here...it'll be the same all over.
They just wont understand, its the SZ Syndrome.

I used Quicktime or VLC Media Player to play this file on my computer. James, many thanks for taking the time to post an example of Karma being implemented in a very basic fashion that "arranger" folks can relate to! I've always been impressed by Karma's capabilities but always wondered how it could be implemented for simple songwriting duties...now I see the light!

Michael

That was some lovely example James, and i agree with Diki that Dom missed a chance not hiring you.

Some more questions, can i setup KARMA in such a way that there is a whole different Pattern when playing minor, major and 7th chords?

Next to that, you said that KARMA has no Intro's endings and fill ins, but thats not entirely correct, KARMA has a drum fill in on the Open labs version.

HI Diki.



Ahh it's just a personal thing with me. If something is worth doing it's worth doing right, if you know what I mean. I just didn't have time today.

Thanks though.



Yes, that would be more accurate. I should also point out that there are a certain amount of GE's in there that do indeed cover Bossa, Country and many other styles of muisc. It's just that they are not assigned to the factory sounds that much. Were they are, they are not implemented in the fashion you head in the video. KARMA is left run very much wild on them.



Right now I'd say it's overall sound, function and implementation is purely based on some sort of market research done on workstation users.

If KORG / Karma Labs were to implement in an Arranger, I bet the arranger side of things would be greatly left alone and KARMA added on the back end of that system to expand it. Sort of like, the arranger still produces it's own notes, but has to pass the midi data through KARMA. How far then that data gets through KARMA without being modified is likely up to the user and the style designers who would have assembled the factory data.

Man that would be one freaking awesome machine to play.



I'm afraid not. I've done it a few times just messing around, but never with the intentions of keeping what I imported for use.

It's easy to do, but I don't want people to get the idea that they can just buy an M3 or an OASYS and go off gigging with it as an arranger. KARMA is implemented in a way that is suited for use on an workstation by workstation users.

So keep in mind the title of this thread. Maybe the future of arrangers is KARMA implemented on one.



lol.... Yeah, KARMA is not exactly easy to explain, but something as simple as a clear video can tell a thousand words. Now if Dom would just send me over a Groove.



I'm kind of worried about that actually. For the life of me I can't understand why KORG are not trying to get an exclusive on KARMA with Stephen.

Right now the way things are Yamaha can approach Stephen Kay and ask him to implement it on the T4. If they do it first, whatever is produced will be the biggest shake up to the Arranger market every.

It would be MASSIVE...!!!! How KORG can sit back and not secure that is kind of scary.



Sure, I'll see what I can do.



I think the problem with most of what we have discussed on the Lionstracs side of things no matter how great I say it could be, I don't have one to prove it to you because I don't own one, and the official demo's don't help matters. If I worked for them as a product specialist things would be very different.



lol....

Cheers
James

I don't mind because if people are willing to post in this thread, then they must have some sort of interesting in knowing how it works.

I think the video will also help. Chances are nobody has ever seen KARMA stripped back that much in a video before.

Regards
James

Hi Bachus



Thanks for the kind words.



The short answer is no in the sense that your expecting it to work in.

You have to remember that a GE is not a pattern in any sense you are used to. So while an Arranger can access a different patterns if you play a 7th, KARMA doesn't need to and so it doesn't.

KARMA can do what you get on your 7th with any chord. It can continuously respond to the pressure you press the keys so you get your straight up pattern your used to, but it slight variations will be introduced as you play chords harder or softer.

That's just the basic idea of it though, like everything else it does way more that this.



lol... funny you should mention this because this is in direct relation to what I've just said in this post above. Yes there are triggers that can make new things happen in real-time. It can be a Pad, Ribbon, Joystick moment or even how hard you press the key.

Regards
James

A few more questions, James...

Can Karma's actions, scene changes and the like be triggered from external controllers? I was noticing how much you have to take your hands off the keys to do much of the scene changing, if it could be transferred to a MIDI pedal it might get more arranger-like.

Can Karma's functions be controlled from the velocity of inputted notes as well (preferably instead of, for me) as pressure? I'm just trying to envision how I would go about controlling it from my playing entirely, rather than from actually jacking around with the sliders and buttons and stuff. I guess I am still too old school to let the machine take over to the point where I DO have a hand free!

And is there the ability to recognize how dense (notes per beat, e.g.) my playing is and get that to trigger a function? Like your 'note number' function, for instance...