For those who wish to travel the software based arranger route for live performances should note that it will take considerable effort:

Setup Auto Accompaniment (Styles, Player, Sampler, Wavetable & Effects)
Setup Melody Voices (Sampler, Virtual Instruments & Effects)
Setup Vocal Harmonizer & Effects

Some of this can be considerable boring work (e.g., tweaking styles)....but the payback is excellent quality sound. Some believe this takes considerable expertise. If I can do it anybody can do it. When I was kid my parents were told by school officials and teachers that I was a moron as indicated by an IQ of 70 or so. They recommended to my parents that I should be institutionalized. The good news is with hard work I somehow survived. So if I can setup a software based system .... anybody can!!!


[This message has been edited by Frank L. Rosenthal (edited 07-20-2006).]

Frank, I am sweating heavily as we speak!!!!! I can see literally MONTHS of work ahead before getting reasonably comfortable with all this technology.

But it IS fun.

Hi Frank and all

I am wondering how long it takes for you to go from one song style/voice set up to another.

I imagine that once you've got it all set up the way you want it, it operates pretty much like a hardware arranger, pick a style pick a voice, play a while, change variation, hit a fill in , change the voice. Is that correct?

What about right hand harmony. I have fallen in love with the three right hand voices on the Tyros 2. How many voices can you use on the right hand at once? How many harmonies are avialable?

Do you ever use a lead sheet at the same time in the monitor? If so how well does that work?

One last one for now, I understand you prefer Live Styler. I also have heard that it will give some problems. A few comments on this will be appreciated.

Sorry for all this at once, but, hey, I'm from the old school, and not even a novice yet, and feel pretty unintelligent about this.

Thanx for letting me pick yer brain

Scott

Scott, I'll give it a try to answer some of your questions.

Selecting voices or styles depends on your setup. You can set things up to respond instantly to your selection. If you are not properly setup and you try and load a 3GB piano that could take 15 seconds. There are two ways to set this up:

a) High Quality melody voices:

Load all the instruments you need for a certain genre of music on separate channels and change channels to select the different voices, e.g., Jazz:

1 Jazz Organ
2 Flute
3 Trumpet
4 Sax
5 Strings
6 Piano
7 Vibes
8 Jazz Guitar

If you pick high quality instruments for each of the above it would take about 30 seconds or so to load them in kontakt. Direct from disk streaming loads only a small part of each sample and pulls the rest of it from the hard disk as you hit the keys.

b) Lower Quality:

You can do the same as the above with smaller samples but still with a much better quality of sound than most hardware based arrangers or workstations. Alternatively you could use the same wavetable as you use for the Auto Accompaniment, e.g., SGM180, Bandstand and so on.

For Auto Accompaniment I would use a GM Wavetable such as SGM180, Bandstand, etc.

To select variations, fills, intros, etc., I find programming the lower octave of my keyboard satisfactory. You could also program the computer keyboard or a separate numeric keypad. This is not the best in the world but you get used to it.

I don't know about Right Hand harmony but I think Live - Styler has this feature but I don't use it. You can layer voices as many as you want within Kontakt. You might ask the author of Live - Styler (Norbert) more about this.

I don't use lead sheets in the computer but I can't see that this should be a problem. If you can use it on your computer now you will be able to use with all this new arranger software loaded and working.

I like Live - Styler because I started with it. It was the best around in the early days. I still like it. It looks good. It is suitable for use with a touch screen. It can be a little challenging to setup but I have always been able to get things to work. Now I just use it for Auto Accompaniment. I don't use its VST Host feature. I find forte Ensemble to be a superior VST/DXi Host. It is especially well made for live performances. I am one of Brainspawn's forte beta testers.

[This message has been edited by Frank L. Rosenthal (edited 07-20-2006).]