Lucky,
I remember that Ketron used to have a neat one-touch facility for selecting sounds: when you press the One Touch button, the screen used to show 24 instrument sounds, any of which could be accessed with a single button press. You can pre-select them ahead of time. I believe there was also a second page of OneTouch sounds, for a total of 48, though to get to the second page, you needed to press another button (so the second page should have been called Two Touch
). Still, this is a pretty neat system. I wonder if the newer boards (SD1, SD5) retain this capability. It would also be cool to be able to select sound programs (in Ketron parlance this is split/layer combinations of up to 4 right hand tones) in the same way.
Yamaha, Korg, and the new Rolands have 4 one-touch buttons, which you can pre-program with sounds for each style (in Roland - don't know about others). This works well too, if you can limit your selection of instruments to 4. In Roland G70, it seems to only work for the built-in styles, and not for the styles on the memory card. Don't know about the others.
I sometimes play in the same mode as you do, having a large repertoire in my head, but not programmed into the instrument. While I can have several songs in a row use the same (or similar) accompaniment style, I like to be able to change the melody voices on the fly. Most instruments require that you select a tone category, and then after paging through the tones in the category and locating the tone you want, you make the individual selection. In most instruments this requires pressing a button on the right end of the instrument (to select the tone bank), and then to refocus and more your attention to the screen, to use paging and selection buttons on either side of the screen to pick out the individual tone. To make things worse, many instruments have loads of tones (Roland boasts over 3000), so I am often afraid to start messing around with selecting tones on the fly during performance.
I think a better system would be to allow selection of a default tone (or several default tones) in each category, e.g. if I select Piano category, a bright piano would be selected, until I pick a different variation (e.g. grand, european PF, etc.). My argument is that while it may be preferrable to be using a Grand sample, it is better to use the default piano tone than getting lost wading through the pages looking for the best tone when you need to make a change quickly. These default tones should be user-configurable. I would even say that the first page should contain default tones, and pressing on the tone bank selection button should cycle through them, except the last selection, which should be "Show full list", that would bring up the regular pages. This way I could set it up to press Piano bank once for Bright Piano, press Piano bank twice for Electric piano, or press Brass bank button once for trumpet, twice for trombone, etc.
There are only so many instruments that a conductor/arranger can select from in real world. Since most of us play music that used to be accompanied by real instruments, I think this approach can be extremely useful in helping users quickly change between sounds of a limited but realistic sound set.
Ideally, these default tone selections could be saved with performance memories, so that when I play, say, Jazz, the default guitar sound would be acoustic, but when a Rock style is being played, the default guitar is, say, overdrive. Nonetheless, I would be happy if an instrument had even a static list of the default tones accessible in this fashion.
At the present time, as far as I know, none of the manufactures are providing such a function; however, it would be a relatively simple software change to implement such functionality.
I hope AJ will make a note of this while contemplating the next round of enhancements of Ketron instruments.
Regards,
Alex
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