Lena Panfilova ....Beauty & Talent !!

There's just something very natural about the sound of a Roland keyboard. I enjoyed listening to all of these.

... and she has a sister !!! ...

God, if I hear one more arranger demo that swamps the backing with the RH and the vocals, I'm gonna hurl!

melody is king. always.

Sorry, but I don't agree. Melody, at the expense of the backing, is simply wrong.

I never can quite understand how we can listen to stuff like this, and so many, many of our own user demos, and excuse a mix that we would never tolerate were one of our musical heroes to release something like it. We expect the music that we BUY to be balanced, full, everything in its place, nothing drowning anything else out...

Yet we forgive ourselves (and so many of the arranger examples posted from just about every source) the very same sin. The melody is only a PART of a piece of music. The backing is only a PART of the song. Get the mix wrong on either end of the scale, and it is still wrong.

If you go to a concert, and all you can hear is vocals, and you have to struggle to hear the drums, or the strings, or the horns, you don't walk out the hall going 'Well, melody is King'. You walk out the hall going 'The mix was lousy!'

Funny you mention it that way, because so many times I've seen shows ( large AND small) where the guitars and or drums were drowning out the vocals. Most Metal bands seem to think that the dual bass drum rapid machine guns are king, but I can't hear a word they are screaming. I can account for taste, and I know I have my "thing", but within reason, the balance is not equal when you are selling a lyric or a melody. Solos are always pumped up ... the lead always gets the nod ... same with our arranger world.

I'm not trying to argue with you - in extreme amounts, I agree that imbalance is wrong too, but given the mechanical, repetitive nature of the backings and the live nature of the lead - I think the lead needs to be emphasized. In my mind, that's the proper balance, but I agree - balance IS important.

Modern arrangers have come a long way from the mechanical, repetitive stuff we started with. Guitar parts are FAR better now, more authentic than ever, drums have dynamics, changing timbres with those dynamics, higher quality sounds and higher quality effects, SA/DNC phrasing makes for realistic legato and performance effects, and styles are often made by real musicians playing MIDI guitars, drums, etc..

In all fairness, if you need to somewhat swamp the backing to disguise this 'repetitiveness', perhaps we shouldn't be playing arrangers? Particularly now that most arrangers have Mark/Jump SMF features, if repetitiveness is an issue, maybe SMF's and M/J to allow restructuring is the answer.

Personally, as long as you don't use the FULL style backing all the time, and play as much as you possibly can, there's enough control over styles to mitigate most of that repetitiveness.

But only on styles that were written (or heavily edited) to use these latest features. Many of us use legacy styles from so far back that these repetitive claims are still true. Stiff, undynamic drums, guitar parts that barely suggest a real guitarist, comping chord parts that jump about. But it is more a function of the style, not the arranger it is played through...

I'm a big fan of the Roland feature (dropped from the BK series, of course - Roland are on a charge to drop every last great and unique feature they ever invented!) where the dynamics (the MIDI velocities themselves) are offset to match your own playing. When this is tied to drum parts that change timbre as you get louder, it's quite amazing how effective this is. This leads me to always want my backing loud and proud! If it sucked, I wouldn't use it in the first place!

"Torna a Surriento" ... 'Come Back to Sorrento' ... one of my mother's favorite Italian songs ... but then, MOST of them were ...