Just wondering.....?..I was at a disco last night for a private affair and when that DJ Kicked it up I wondered how any arranger player could ever compete with the "HOUSE" Electronica style music songs they were playing all night to a packed dance floor.

I use some for my gigs.
I have collected and modified quite a few styles that keep me busy for a while.
Plus I have a good collection of MP3's that will keep the younger generation happy for a long time.
Eric

Eric......exactly you gotta mix it up! I would think a Mediastation would excel nicely in a House gig situation also.



[This message has been edited by Dnj (edited 06-06-2010).]

If you can't play it, that is...

I cant play it....so diki what do you do in a house music situation witha G70?.....



[This message has been edited by Dnj (edited 06-06-2010).]

Glad you pointed it out, Donny. How did it happen? Here's how. Big Bands became to expensive so we knocked it down to Quintets, then Trios, and finally Arrangers. Now, in the continuing quest to get more with less (musical) effort, we have what you just experienced at the Disco. In no time at all, we'll be back where we started from........a JUKEBOX. Total audience participation, no request denied, no pesky musicians showing up late and taking breaks, heaven on earth for the club owner.

Hey, we brought it on ourselves (with a little help from the club owners). We 'educated' our audiences to accept less......SMF's and backing tapes and lip syncing, and fake keyboard playing and Guitar Hero and DJ's and Karaoke and ........ blah, blah. Where does it end? Pretty soon, the only gigs around WILL be NH's 'cause that's the only place left with audiences that can remember what it was like to hear someone playing live........well, semi-live, if you're using an arranger keyboard. I may be going in circles here so I'll stop now, but I'm glad Donny brought this topic up.

Luckily, there are still a few owners out there who care enough about the quality of their entertainment and are willing to spend a little extra for the 'real deal' AND a few musicians that care enough about the art to take a 'little less' to add another player or two to enhance their product. JMO.

chas

Chas or you can become flexible and expand your talents to make a living as a full time Pro musician/Entertainer and adapt to the changes, play live, DJ, mix them both add backing tracks, fill in with a band, etc, etc, and try to cover as many bases to survive as possible. Nothing wrong with that. Every business needs to keep up with the market trends. It's just the way it is. Too late to worry about why ..

My band just PLAYS the music, Donny. As you well know, it doesn't take sounding EXACTLY like the record to entertain people and make them dance...

The kids are just happy enough to hear a song they are familiar with that its' instrumentation doesn't really matter...

As different sounding as you are prepared to be from the original to do jazz tunes or even doo-wop (that harmonizer doesn't even get CLOSE!), why worry about nailing a house groove? Just play the song, make it your own, and they still dance!

BTW, strange how many MUSICIANS there are here that somehow manage to survive without DJ-ing, Donny...

What is it that they have that you don't?

I dont think you would survive playing clubs here with your band trying to fake HOUSE dance music in these NY/NJ HI ENERGY dance clubs no way!



[This message has been edited by Dnj (edited 06-06-2010).]

I asked about YOU ALONE with your G70 arranger not a band.......but thanx for my answer...I thought so anyway.

Actually, my arranger's drum section would do a MUCH better job of nailing the house beat were we to use it alongside the drummer. But I doubt any more people would dance than if we stick to the live version..! It's possible you have forgotten the power of a really good live drummer to make people's butts move..! Anyway, you aren't going to get hired to do a night's worth of house. You just want to be able to throw one or two in if you get a request...

I am more likely to credit you not being familiar with the music as to why you don't think you can compete, Donny. Your arranger, with as much care put into the registrations as you do for older styles, is as capable of getting the floor packed. But if you don't know the tunes, don't know the style, it doesn't matter whether the gear is capable or not.

And let's all move on. We've been down this path before and it never ends well.

Your talking about completely different types of gig. Both of you are correct for the type of gig you are playing. There is no argument needed here.


[This message has been edited by Nigel (edited 06-06-2010).]

I don't understand the need to compete for gigs that you don't like or don't understand. Personally, I don't ever want to hear a 70 year old lady sing a Christina Agulera song, OK? I don't want to hear a country fiddler try to learn a violin concerto. Some people are able to cross genre lines successfully. I feel for example that I can do both country and jazz pretty well; but I don't do electronica; and I don't do metal. I suppose I could learn a few metal songs, but do I really want to get a metal gig? No, I don't. I see no need to compete for that gig

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9IG9oNOGls&feature=related


I would love to hear some of these songs played soley on any arranger KB using styles only?

I rest my case.

[This message has been edited by Dnj (edited 06-07-2010).]

I think mediastation running ableton live can do a decent job for a Deejay style dance music performance... overhere in Holland on weddigns and such you would be a very wanted artist if you could cater both the old with traditional keyboard playing and the young with some dance/house music.

Ableton live gives you a way to play those typical house loops and build up your performance, while you can play some solo's on top of that.

Somehow i hope that Dom will add many of the feautures i really like from ableton live to Q-ranger. Session view is an awesome tool for these kinds of performances..

Next to that, i love how you can stack VSt effects to a track in the Arrangement view of a certain track. Ableton live is the tooling for modern house/dance style play, Dom really needs to add support for these kind of things to mediastation because this makes the system wanted by even more people.

No offense, Donny, but you can get any arranger as close to those tunes as you can get an arranger to sound like a REAL bigband, or a REAL jazz ensemble...

In other words, not even CLOSE!

The problem comes when you hold an arranger to a higher standard for contemporary music than you do for legacy. Be as picky about the sound, playing and dynamics for old styles, and you realize just how short they come.

The other problem you have is that few make house styles for you to use. If you made your own, and leveraged the full soundset and synth capabilities of the S910, I'm sure you could get pretty close. But, let's face it... most people that use arrangers aren't into house! So there aren't any styles. But, if you listen to the originals of many of the tunes that some styles are based on in older styles (rhumba, swing, even rock), you start to realize just how short of the mark even THEY are. Yet we use them anyway!

Close enough is close enough... at least for the people WE play for!

Hi Dnj,

I like the music genre, especially Funky House, but I am afraid you'll never hear that authentic club/house/disco sound on an arranger unless it's sampled properly. Every arranger I've owned has never been able to replicate this type of music and don't even mention the styles, most are nowhere near arranged to a high standard. In saying that, Yamaha do have some acceptable club styles and the Korg has that lovely Dream style that resembles Robert Mile's "Children", however, I never found anything remotely usable for use on a Ketron or GEM, they were truly awful for Club or House music.

I thought Yamaha were going the right way about it though a few years ago when they released the DJX was it? Shame it used a basic sound engine and sounded very toy'ish but the idea was great, if they had continued to research and develop the series and used a professional sound engine it could have been used for DJ'ing.

I think most people who use arrangers are not bothered about those types of styles and sounds anyway which I would suspect is why it's always been the weakest recreated genre on all arrangers.

Danny ....all good points
Most of this type of music isn't created at all with arrangers...so here lies the difficulty recreating them... and adding the vocals is another story. But as an arranger player you sometimes might find yourself in a gig that turns into a situation that you would need some modern up to date Hi Energy house music for dancing...here lies using alternatives like mp3's etc etc....which is just another tool for the player to make a successful affair.

Reggae is another example of a poorly recreated genre that's even worse than House styles, but again, Yamaha does a better job than most but still not quite there. The biggest problem is the drums they are just simply not punchy enough and sound too thin, and that's on every arranger. With House music, the drums and their quality is primarily what makes or breaks it being great, and although drums are important on most music genres it's not as forgiving on Dance music if they are cheaply created especially when comparing to an MP3, so it's the drums which determines a really great funky and memorable beat, bass is important too but you could probably get away with a "sub bass" sound as long as the drums sound authentic in which no arranger to date can quite achieve yet.

[This message has been edited by DannyUK (edited 06-07-2010).]

But as soon as you play MP3's, you are no longer a 'player'. You are a DJ. Nothing wrong with that, don't get me wrong. But while you are DJ-ing, you aren't 'playing'.

It all boils down to what you want to do. Me, I like playing! The day I HAVE to become a DJ, I'll go down to Wal-Mart's and try to get a job as a greeter...!

Thing is, NO MUSIC at all is 'created' on arrangers. No-one uses them on commercial records any more than house music does (at least, not the arranger section!). It's just that more and better styles have been made for older style musics, but even those are pretty lame compared to the original...

[This message has been edited by Diki (edited 06-07-2010).]

Diki, you wouldn't last a day as a Wal-Mart greeter........well, maybe if they gave you a bullet-proof vest. I can picture you now taking orders from the head greeter, you know, the one with the missing teeth and the 80 IQ. Nope, no potential conflict there. I can hear you now (to potential customer); "you know that you can get a better deal over at Target, you moron", and that's AFTER you've had your sensitivity training .

Just joshing you.



chas

By the time I can't play for a living, I'll BE the moron with the 80 IQ! I ought to fit in perfectly...

If the gig requires you to be both a player and a DJ so be it. Then you MUST play the originals when you DJ. For the DJ sessions playing a near version just aint gonna cut it. As I said the terms of the gig determine what you need to do.

I just listened to some of the S910 DANCE bank styles, Electronica, Funkyhouse etc, ..... not bad at all, nice intros endings too.

OK, well assuming we still want an On-Topic reply here....

We regularly do our own Dance Remixes/Mash ups of popular songs using my Korg PA1x's Sampled Loops (triggered via Pads) and I have one or two "Purely Arranger" Patches that I can use as Dance/House/Techno (to use the broadest terms...) versions of the Big Hits.

Eg We do a somewhat "Hard House Version" of Bleeding Love (Leona Lewis), we do a Mash up of Lady Ga Ga's Pokerface/Bad Romance using both a Midi File (Pokerface) and a triggered heavy drum loop (a la Bad Romance).

A few other surprises at our most adventurous gigs, but if you're asking do we do ENTIRE gigs full of House/Techno remixes solely with my Arranger, then the answer is no....

FWIW, we come off as quite convincing with that kind of stuff when we do it.

So I would assume by some of the replies the best way to do ELECTRONICA/HOUSE Style music for a all night Hi Energy Dance gig is NOT with an arranger live....but instead leave it up to the duties of DJ'ing the original songs or useing the arranger KB to somehow be incorporated into creating trcaks/loops,..... and recording your own House/Electronica songs and playing them as Mp3's also, .........nothing wrong with that just using the right tools for the job at hand.

[This message has been edited by Dnj (edited 06-08-2010).]

Thanks so much Hellboy that is exactly what we want to hear.

The rock band I play with plays a couple of electronica songs. We use SMFs to play the extra keyboard parts I can't cover. We play Hella Good by No Doubt and Get The Party Started by Pink. But we are hired as a live band so we provide a live band performance ( augmented with sequencing when appropriate ). If we were being hired to DJ as well then I would definately play MP3s of the originals. But that is not what we are hired for. As I said earlier in this thread it is entirely is up to what the service is you are being paid to provide.



[This message has been edited by Nigel (edited 06-09-2010).]

The "arranger" section may not get the job done...but the SMF player should be alright...and you still can be the "player"...just learn your parts...

As for using the original songs as MP3 ..why not...it is what the dancers want to hear...no matter how well you "think" you play.. ..If you must play...play along, you shouldn't kill the song too much..

Agreed Fran good post!

Nigel, well said.

Dnj, I mentioned earlier that some of the dance styles on the T3 were pretty good, some are arranged very well but they still have something missing in the sound (mainly the drums), doesn't sound authentic enough when comparing to a sampled or mp3 track.

The thing is, as computer technology has become more accessible and this type of music advances so quickly (just like with fashion), software has also advanced so the interacting with the music production technology bears no relationship to traditional musical performance practices, eg, using a traditional musical instrument to recreate a sound as close to the original as possible replicating their exact nuances which can affect the way it's reproduced on a arranger keyboard, so therefore I still think that recreating the specific Electronica sounds/styles may only be properly recreated by means of sampling.

Well, take a look at some of the acts that actually ARE house musicians... What you WON'T see them use is an arranger. Or an mp3 player.

The groovebox, the laptop, the synth and WS keyboards, those are the tools of choice for people who actually PLAY house music (not play a CD of house music!).

This brings up another important question to me...."who would want to "play" house music?"

Not I.....

I want to "play" music that will invoke a feeling or memories.... music that is best when you can "sell" the song...

I think this is the purpose of music..

House music and it's relative music...is a beat....something to bounce around with...I do not think you will remember these "house" songs beyond the current time..let alone any lyric content...

If House is your bag...better you than I...

Just play the dang MP3 if you have request....and move on to the good stuff...

Might not be your bag or mine....but WORLDWIDE it's BIGGER & Played more in Discos or Dance Clubs around the world then any other genre of music...or anything anyone here performs on an arranger....
sorry but that's the facts. I agree with playing the Mp3's/Cd's etc, when needed in some of our gigs....but your not gonna PUMp a Hi Energy Disco dance club with an Arranger KB....just NOT the right TOOL for the Job!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_music



[This message has been edited by Dnj (edited 06-10-2010).]