A rose by any other name...

I find them glitchy in real time at least.... but if it works for some so be it.

Donny, it's like a woman - you have to know how to handle her. Ooops - what the heck do "I" know about that! lol

Dave just keep at it....it's like fallin' off a horse.....
just dust off and hop back in the saddle

breakfast soon?

I read post after post where many do NOT understand the feature, and confuse it with a chord 'TRACK', so no, I don't think a rose by any other name applies. Many are confusing this rose with a tulip!

There's a radical difference between a chord track recorded in advance, and a 'looper' that grabs what you just played. Every time you do it, you can change chords, substitute, anything you can think of. A chord track restores the same limitations that SMF's have.

A cool trick you can do, for instance, is play the chords in in first or second inversion (or whatever would make for an interesting progression), but with ON BASS off... then, on some of the iterations, switch it on... different bassline! One button...

To be honest, a chord track recorded in advance is comparable in some ways to an SMF with markers in it and a Cover Tools facility. You can vary radically how the SMF sounds and plays, but in the end, it is still prepared in advance. Arranger playing is all about what do we want to do NOW, tonight, this song, this time round. This is where grabbing the chords you JUST played, rather than setting them up in advance gives the edge to the Chord Looper, IMO.

Chord sequencer...chord looper...means the same to me.

I liked it on the E-70...easy to use, and hamn dandy for freeing a hand to work the pitch bender, variations etc.

I'm surprised Roland ditched it...perhaps their brilliant market research indicated that not many actually used it.

Doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea.

Hopefully Korg's Chord Sequencer/Chord Looper/Tulip/Rose/Petunia works as seamlessly as did the Roland version.

Ian

I think Roland's market research actually DID find out the truth! Few really DID 'get it', few considered it a 'must have' feature, and I definitely remember very few letting out a howl of protest when it was axed!

Essential to play songs like Sleepwalk or Steel Guitar Rag in real time.
DonM

my friend, I have used computers to record music with, for about 10 years. Ableton, Cubase, Band in a Box...etc....been there, done that.

Many people say that 'things on a DAW are easier'. I don't agree.

First off, Ableton is not an arranger. It's more or less like an hi-tech synth workstation. I want an arranger, because it's the best instrument to try, with immediate response, song structures, new progressions, etc etc.

There is no comparison.....

There are so many other reasons....would take me hours to list them all.
I am not against computers, but let me say it, they are far from inspiring.
All the zillions options that there are in all these software programs, are not necessary, in many cases they are in fact useless, and distract from the main goal, to write music.

Also, keyboard arrangers are very educative. Just the other day I was studying one of the styles in my keyboard, 'sci-fi march' which is clearly inspired by the Star Wars soundtracks.
It was a blast just to try stuff with it and analyze the orchestration. I have got a music lesson out of it, and it didn't feel like a chore.

Maybe I have associated to the computer a feeling of dread, I don't know. I know that if I only have my computer, and I want to practice or write music, I tend to procrastinate. With my keyboard, I just switch it on and within seconds I am lost in another world.

The thing about these instruments is that they are built by people who understand what making music is all about.
You record something. With my keyboard, if I want to replace a set of badly played notes, I just set it to 'punch in' as soon as I play the first note, and punch out with the pedal. It's so simple and direct.

With Cubase, you have to drag lines and click on so much crap, that by the time you do it, it just makes me feel like making music is a chore.

Also, all the distractions. It's hard to make music on the computer and still not checking your email every 15 minutes. This sort of thing.

I use the computer only after I finished to write the music on my keyboard, by importing it as a midi file in Cubase and substituting all the sounds with the ones from my sample libraries (and if it were not for the sample libraries, I would not use a computer for music, at all).

But I don't write the music directly on the computer. Anyways, that's just me.

What has been said here about the 'chord track' on the Korg, is interesting. I am pretty sure I checked out the manuals for most recend Korg arrangers, and didn't find anything about the 'chord track' but I will have a better look. If that's the case, I might prefer the Korg , as the sequencer in the Tyros is a bit too underspecced for me, although I am learning to work around it's limitations.

The item in discussion is not a "Chord track" ... it is a chord sequencer(like Roland has had in the past), and if you are so tied to your email that you can't work for 15 minutes without checking in .... you just MAY belong in my school!
(Love my kids, but they are SO computer addicted .... very bad thing for today's youth)
Why all the fuss about the name - it's such a cool feature!