Diki is on the right track here. I have a Tyros 3 and it is easy to use especially recording, customizing, etc. However there are few modern styles and too many ballroom, big band, easy listening old 50's, 60's, 70's styles. Now I also own a motif XF6 and while it has a more modern approach to sound there are still older style performances there as well that cover various Rock, R&B, Jazz, Dance, Trance, etc genres. But no Ballroom, easy listening, etc. These however are only examples and you can easily (short learning curve) create your own by simply selecting from the 8,000 arps and modifying tempo, effects, etc.

In this way I have the best of both worlds as I can create the Bass and drum parts on the Motif and combine them with selected channels of a Tyros Style, with some Tyros lead voices and Motif lead voices. Of course this required me to buy both. But you could buy a MOX and a 750 and get almost everything I have.

The problem the big three have is their Arrangers and Workstation groups are not even in the same country and the operating systems and overall designs of the two are very different.

So I don't believe we will see this mind meld soon. However the Arranger could be made more attractive to younger players if they did just three things:

1. Include only modern styles. Focus on the same genres that you find in the workstations and that allow the player to cover songs from the last 20 years or so. Also exclude ballroom, big band, easy listening,etc. Purge it.

2. This is the difficult one. Have a marketing strategy that gets demo equipment into the major chains ( Sam Ash, Guitar Center ) so people can try it and see how easy it would be to create or cover songs.

3. Get some major endorsements from actually bands or players.

I have said several times, the way for arrangers to be marketed to youngsters is by style selection. In other words, no ROM Styles... All Styles to be loaded into Flash ROM on customer selection.

So, you have the Modern Pack, a full set of modern beats and grooves, hiphop, dubstep, rap, house, modern rock styles etc., tailored to the under 30 crowd.

Then in the exact same Arranger, a Classic Pack, with the styles that we old farts need and want...

But here's the icing on the cake (especially for the manufacturers) - For maybe $100-200 more, you can purchase BOTH sets of styles. Obviously, these will have to be copy protected (something I've advocated for a long time, to incentivize style producers) or everybody will pirate the other set, but that's nothing that can't be figured out.

But the home organ is the perfect illustration of what happens to a type of keyboard when the manufacturers give up on trying to appeal to younger players. Gone the way of the dodo...

I didn't mention this before but IMHO Workstations sound better than Arrangers. When I had just the Tyros 3 I really enjoyed the sound and thought it first class. However after playing the Motif XF for the last 2 years as well as having spent time with the Korg Kronos and Roland Jupiter line in music stores these workstations just sound better as well. Lately I have been listening to the Roland and Korg Arranger products and while they in some cases have a more lively sound than Tyros they are still less enjoyable to me than any of the workstations. So I think to appeal to a younger demographic the product would need the more "real" sounds of a workstation rather than that of the typical Arranger. There are exceptions. I do find certain Acoustic instruments to be more "real" on Arrangers. For example the Sax and Trumpet voices on the Tyros, again IMHO, are not equaled in any other Arranger or Workstation. However the Motif Performances and Korg Combis, to me, alwasys sound better than Styles.

Very good suggestions from everyone - wonder if Yamaha even cares what we think. Would sure be nice if the next TOTL arranger from Yamaha was much lighter and had a smaller foot print.

Deane

IMO how much more does anyone need from Yamaha......this S950 I have to say is definitely one of the best units they have made since the PSR3000...certainly will be a Classic amongst arranger keyboards....there isn't much I cannot do with this baby on stage, looks great (Black), lightweight, sounds Amazing using styles & sounds, great onboard speakers, MP3 USB audio player, USB, great Voc Mic processor w/fx, easy editing abilities, & the few improvements it might need like a better VH2, and couple of added features to the MFD, would make it complete for MY needs, but they are miniscule compared to ALL the greatness the S950 provides the Pro Gigging OMB player,....who needs a TOTL anymore at extravagant prices unless you got bucks to burn ? Nothing compares on the market most certainly the Yamaha S950 is the BEST BANG FOR THE BUCK!

I think Diki is right as to the demographic that is/should be aimed at by Yamaha and others. While the "old farts" and ballroom dancing population is shrinking, there are more younger top 40 youngsters around. We want the older stuff and I'll bet most of us scroll right through the hip/hop/house and metal/grunge hard driving styles. But from a business standpoint, where do you put you R & D and manufacturing dollars? I imagine these decisions are not just sales driven , but demographic and competitor driven. Looking toward the future, the arranger dollars are better spent on MOTL as the market shrinks. And the big money spent on current and future direction of music and the related technology.

That being said, the TOTL arrangers that we have available to us now may be the highest level we will see. It's not a bad lot to choose from. Their may be changes due to technology- a music rest with ipad dock built in, more touchscreens, but not huge improvements.

When I was a kid I listened the music of my Father that was always being played in the house and grew to like, appreciate, and perpetuate it. My kids are ages 19-26. They have no connection to "our" music even when growing up with it playing in my house. We are only one generation away from the "old fart" music disappearing. So T5-no. It is about business, not us. Put some dollars into MOTL arrangers for us until we are all in diapers again..

Until some combination of loops and arps (which operate completely differently to styles' chord lookup tables) is combined with regular arranger operation, the kids are going to look elsewhere. Certain aspects of arpeggiator features sound utterly different to styles. The notes you actually PLAY are what trigger the arp, not what the software interprets you MEANT...

This results in patterns and figures that are so different from style NTT's they really can't be compared. But there is much in style NTT's that IS useful, too. It's about time that the two methods were combined... affordably. I know someone is going to say that there is an arpeggiator on the Ketron's, but sadly, compared to the complex one's on modern WS's, the Ketron's is little more than an 80's style arpeggiator. You only have to go play a MotifXF, or a KorgM3 to see how far things have come. But they still sound utterly different to styles.

Come on Yamaha/Korg/Roland... Time to consolidate both methods!