Came across this site https://deltarray.com/ while I was looking for something else and it does look interesting, so may be of interest to SZ users, particularly as it is one of the few ones that will run on a Mac.

Bill

Interesting and generally comprehensive. Unfortunately, they copied Yamaha's mistake of making "on bass" (slash chord recognition) one of the chord recognition "modes," instead of an individually selectable setting. So if I need a chord like C/Bb I'm stuck with "Fingered on Bass" and have to play at least 3 notes for all of the chords. This is much less convenient than Roland and Ketron's system, which would require only Bb below C when "bass inversion" is active, and otherwise acknowledge chords with a minimum of notes, including majors with a single note.

Nimbu is a similarly comprehensive software arranger. Since at least 2022 they have implemented on-bass chord recognition as a separate function, so that it can be used in conjunction with any mode. Including one that faithfully emulates Roland Chord Intelligence. For alternative consideration: https://www.nimbu.de/en/release_notes.html

Five fingers on each hand, only need 3 for an inversion, I'm not seeing the problem..!

It's true that most of us five fingers on each hand. [I use my RH strictly for melody, so in my case it's only the left hand that matters.] Some of us just don't have copious skill or time to practice. The problem is, for people transitioning from Roland, GEM, Casio, or even Ketron since 2015 or so... if those folks were making full use of the ergonomic aids their keyboards have to offer (aka "Chord Intelligence"), they would not be able to play Giglad without re-learning.

Consider: the best typists can accurately type 90-100 words per minute. Meanwhile, stenographers can type 200-250 words per minute using a special ergonomic keyboard. Modern cars with automatic transmissions, dual-clutch, etc., are faster in a straight line, and even around the Nuburgring compared the best human drivers with a stickshift. Technology is a great equalizer and force multiplier. If you're playing a fast progression where the chord and bass note change on multiple successive beats, one finger major chords and two-finger slash chords HAVE to be faster and easier (although Roland doesn't penalize you for playing all of the notes.) Often times being able to trigger the chord with a subset of notes makes the difference between moving your whole hand, or reaching the chord(s) from your current position. And for me personally, hand "jumps" are an almost guaranteed mistake or late note. I've even thought about sticking a post-it flag to the SIDE of a key, as an aid to hand positioning.

As I see it, organists and arranger players are playing three parts simultaneously: melody, harmony and bass. Perhaps I wouldn't mind 3- and 4-finger chords so much if I also had the skill to kick pedals, because then my feet would control the bass and any convenient inversion would do. But I've never tried pedals, so to control both the bass and harmony my left hand ends up jumping around like Daffy Duck on speed. If I'm going to play three parts "live," I want all the help that technology can afford!

My point remains -- there's no logical reason to limit slash chord recognition to 3-finger chords. By making "on bass" a separate setting that can be used with ANY chord recognition mode (as on Roland, Ketron, etc.), it helps folks like me without making anyone worse off. It's just software, easy enough to change it to accommodate players of all backgrounds and skills.

A pedalboard is no different to a keyboard, except the keys (Pedals) are longer, wider and larger spaced, so you can play them with your feet.
There are however 2 types of pedalboards, a full pedalboard where the pedals pivot from the rear, and a spinet pedalboard that pivots from the front, with a different technique required for each one.
My advice is to go for a spinet one unless you will be playing a lot of classical, church or theatre organ style.
With a spinet make sure you sit with your foot off the floor and can swing your leg over the pedals, ((If you need to lift your leg you are doing it wrong) and depressing the pedals with your toes, after that it is the same as learning the keyboard. (Just start off by playing the root note of the chord you are playing on the keyboard on the pedals)
It can be great fun, so have a think about it. (You also won't need to have your left hand bouncing all over the place unless you are playing piano)

Bill

As we've discussed before Ted, the major problem with 'shortcut' fingering systems is, once you get heavily (irretrievably!) invested in one, you are completely at the mercy of manufacturers to adopt it across ALL brands (never going to happen, each manufacturer thinks they have the perfect system and their users have boxed themselves in to where they HAVE to agree) or the brand that has the system you have trained yourself in must continue to produce arrangers AND not decide to change it...

That's an awful lot riding on a system that, if you had taken the time to simply learn 'normal' fingering, you would be independent of brand and system! It took YEARS for you to get automatic with that system, and no matter how skilled or unskilled you think you are, ANY system can be learned in years!

Yes, shorthand gives a faster transcribing of dictation than longhand, but years ago there were several other shorthand systems, and no doubt there were many that had picked the wrong system to learn. But I bet that rather than deciding to leave the profession (if others can't transcribe your shorthand, you leave yourself few that can employ you) most of the users of systems that got left behind simply knuckled down and learn the eventual winner.

The shorthand analogy unfortunately rather falls down when compared to keyboard chord recognition, because, while shorthand IS faster than longhand, once learned, 'normal' fingering is just as fast as one finger systems. And considerably more chords can be fingered with four fingers than two or three!

You've painted yourself into a corner. If you're happy enough there, that's okay. But the world of other manufacturers AND the expanding world of software arrangers is out of reach while you cling to a system NOBODY uses any more.

A half an hour a day would have you mastering 'normal' fingering or Yamaha's system in a few months. What's that against YEARS stuck in that corner unable to progress..?

You can do it!

I appreciate the encouragement from everyone. However, this isn't about what I might be able to learn (and unlearn!) in my remaining years. My point is that it's SOFTWARE and I shouldn't have to. In some ways your recommendations are tantamount to saying that soldiers should learn how to make and shoot longbows in case an Apocalypse ends the industial production of guns and bullets. As a species we have advanced on the assumption that technology becomes the basis for even greater technology in the future.

Giglad is first and foremost an arranger software. The purpose of which is to generate polyphonic output in a semi-intelligent way, based on a (relative) minimum of input. It's evident to me that the programmer/developer aped Yamaha's unfortunate approach without considering the implications. Yamaha is currently the 900-lb gorilla of the arranger world so it seems logical to copy them. However, Roland had standardized on their excellent Chord Intelligence by 1991, and by the late '90s had a dominant market share. Yamaha was still fumbling to release their first pro arranger. [Do any of you know how many different chord recognition modes the PSR-9000pro had!? (Check out the manual)] If Roland hadn't removed their foot from the accelerator on arranger development, and also made some different decisions about distribution and sales, they would STILL have a large user base that could not be so easily ignored.

Playing a 3- or 4-note chord CANNOT be easier, faster, more ergonomic or accurate than playing a 1- or 2-note SUBSET of that same chord. As long as the "intelligent" system doesn't require you to play notes that aren't part of the original chord (and sometimes Yamaha's does), you'll always be doing less work, or the same amount. Consider: in the Megahertz world of integrated circuits, even the best players are NOT playing those 3- or 4-notes at the "same time." On a piano or organ it's not critical. But on an arranger, if the timing difference exceeds a certain threshold (20ms?) false notes, or even falsely recognized chords appear in the MIDI. The best boards disguise this phenomenon with portamento, but if the player is sloppy it's audible and sounds "arrangerish." The more notes you have to press to trigger a chord, the greater the risk of one of them being late or incorrect. My other observation also remains valid, that successive 3- or 4-note chords are much more likely to require hand repositioning than successive "shortcut" chords. Single-note majors (assuming root bass) completely avoid the timing issue and are a boon to hand positioning.

Many of you are pros and can play two-handed piano, AGO-type church organs, the B3 and other non-intelligent instruments. You have my admiration and respect! My own music-making ability has never extended beyond chord organs like the Hammond S6 (brilliant for 1950) or its successors, intelligent arrangers. Others in my camp should know that neither Giglad (as of this writing) nor Yamaha's current-production arrangers offer an optimal system for playing common chords ergonomically and with a minimum of fingering. Yamaha will probably never correct its "mistake" but I hold out hope that the programmers of Giglad will stumble across this post and pity our plight!

Here in lies the problem, too many people rely on technology to get things done, and when it fails, which it always does, (Just look at the recent problems caused by a faulty update) your stuck left hanging there.
As to soldiers, on the battlefield if your supplies get cut off (Even if it’s only for a short time) you will have to be careful with ammunition or use more basic forms of combat to survive. (This is why they are taught to fight with basic things as well as guns)

Yamaha and Korg are the only two main players left as they did things the way people wanted, whereas others (Even though they were more advanced in many ways) didn’t and fell by the wayside as they couldn’t make a profit. (Exactly the same happened in the home organ market which the arranger took over from, however just like the home organ market became niche, arrangers are now coming close to the same)

If you’re playing an organ (With pedals) your left hand can remain within 1 octave to get virtually all the chords you need, (Many chord changes just require the movement on one or two fingers) so there is actually less chance of getting the chord wrong.

You are perfectly correct about professional players; however for home players it is just as easy to learn full chords as it is 1 finger, (Which is really a misnomer as you have to use more than one finger to get all the chords you want) in fact in their heyday there were plenty of schools that taught people to paly home organ and arrangers and not one of them used 1 finger chord lessons as they were more difficult then learning full chords. (To be honest 1 finger chords just made marketing easier, rather than making the playing easier)

In the end it comes down to what the user wants and so you just choose which is best for your enjoyment. (There are 3 main computer OS (Mac. Linux and Windows) with each of their users claiming there’s is better than the others, whereas in reality they are just variations of the same thing, and you just choose which does what you want the best, with the same applying to home organs and arrangers)

Bill

Yamaha and Korg arrangers are still around because of better marketing/sales, so their arranger product lines have retained the continued support of management. Not because they have a better system for simplified chord fingering. Roland's was first, not perfect but quite good. GEM, (and for the last nine years or so) Ketron and Casio, have very similar systems. I can play most songs on their boards without re-learning. (It's harder to "unlearn" a song that you know than to learn a new one!)

But because of Yamaha's success, most of today's hardware and software arrangers have added a fingering mode that emulates Yamaha's; for all its faults it has become a quasi-standard enabling people with no musical training to play a limited repertoire of chords. What I've been trying to communicate here is that the "Roland system" is an alternate quasi-standard, with greater merit to be preserved and promulgated. If Roland really has abandoned the arranger market, they should put their Chord Intelligence in the public domain; bake it into the firmware of their MIDI controllers like the A-800 and license it to Ableton, where it can benefit future generations of music-makers. It lives on in the recent FP-E50 and Go:Keys 5, so there is hope.

One tone per key was a physical necessity due to the construction of the pianoforte and organ-type instruments going back to ancient Rome. With electronics we've moved beyond that constraint. Perhaps even beyond the form factor of the black-and-white piano keyboard! I've spent years of my life NOT learning to play the organ (largely because I never had a realistic opportunity while I was young), but instead learning how to cover songs in the easiest way possible. There were no clip launchers in the '70s or '80s. At the whole song level, you could make a mixtape. Getting more hands-on than that meant a chord organ or autoharp, which were fine for the casual musician playing carols 'round the tree. Things got much more difficult (and expensive) from there.

Somewhere through the decades it seems that a philosophy took root that no one should be a casual musician. "If you're going to play music, knuckle down and learn your scales! Otherwise, just play a tape!" As I've gotten older I guess my world view is going away with me, and I think that's unfortunate. Arrangers with all of their proprietary gimmicks are an excellent bridge for the musically curious. And if there IS an easier way for someone with minimal training to cover pop songs and standards, I would like to know about it!!

Learning proper chords is way easier than learning 1 finger chords, (Thats why schools and teachers never taught 1 finger chords) plus most pop songs have a limited chord range so will be easy to get into.

Bill

I think that the problem is that Ted expects a software developer to spend considerable time and resources to code a recognition system that only aging Roland users ever used, and most have moved on from if they aren’t still stuck with their aging Roland.

That’s a microscopic segment of his potential customer base..!

If I were in Ted’s situation, I might try to contact the developer and ask how much money would persuade the dev to add the Roland OFS system to the options. Would $500 do it? If he says yes, that’s money well spent! Mind you, I’d lowball him to start with… $250?! 😂

The Roland system is good, it has merit. It's the easiest way (at least among those embedded in consumer hardware sold in volume) to play a broad selection of popular chord types without extensive training / time commmitment. It's undeniably more ergonomic than full-fingering, especially when playing seventh chords, and in certain keys. However it doesn't penalize you for playing all of the notes. Casio and Ketron have been using a very similar system, at least since 2015. It DESERVES to be proliferated because it makes some better off without making any worse off, and it's logical.

When I pointed all of this out to Klaus (who programmed a competing software arranger called Nimbu), he worked with me. We exchanged emails for a couple of months. He put the time in, and added the Roland emulation mode.

You are all trained musicians. What would a novice have to say? Or an engineer, or an ergonomicist who has studied the human hand? We don't use longbows or sailing ships anymore except for sport. And nearly every sailing ship afloat has a motor as backup. Our technology has taken us past the necessity of one tone per key. Finally it's SOFTWARE. Let's please be a little open-minded here!

The only issue I have with software arrangers is firstly, as a live player, this means lugging a laptop around, something I’m opposed to because it sits between you and your audience (I want the audience to focus on me, not my gear!).

Secondly, you really need a sound source close to identical to the brand of styles you are playing or you face a mountain of editing work, and if you’ve got a Yamaha arranger to play them into, might as well load them in the arranger itself! Ditto playing Roland styles etc..

It’s been 30+ years since arranger soundsets (and especially the drums) could easily be used for any style and sound close to the original. Heck, to get the best out of a Roland style on a real Roland with 20 years between them takes considerable editing! That is massively compounded between brands…. We lost 1:1 compatibility the minute we moved past GS mapping.

We saw how all this played out with the Lionstracs software/hardware hybrid. The idea of a software arranger and open soundset is so tempting, but in practice, few aging arranger players have either the time, the skill or the patience to hand edit everything not already edited by the manufacturer, which means you’re back to basically a closed hardware arranger.

20-30 years of divergence from early standard soundsets has turned cross-brand hybrids a pipe dream unless you want basic soundcard quality style playback. Today’s Korg and Yamaha (and the last generation of Roland’s) soundsets sound COMPLETELY different, and their styles incorporate so much patented features, I think the days of putting a Roland style through a Yamaha soundset and it being acceptable have long gone…

It's easier than that, Diki. In my posts above, I'm referring exclusively to chord recognition, e.g., "fingering," which directly affects the player's workload in real time. It's a learned behavior, which for players of the aformentioned brands would require UNlearning. (Frankly I would have less frustration if you handed me a clarinet, because at least then my body and brain would know that it's not a keyboard!)

What the style and effects engines ultimately do with the recognized chords is a separate discussion, and it remains to be seen (heard?) whether Giglad can faithfully render Yamaha styles with their nuanced effects like Megavoice guitars, etc. I agree that Yamaha, Ketron, Korg, and even Casio have more sophisticated and flexible note transposition rules, etc., than Roland. Since its days of market hegemony circa 1998, Roland added exactly ONE style control parameter ("adaptive chord voicing.") Other brands didn't add much either, but most were already better.

As a workaround (you would call it a crutch), I've used one arranger to control another. For example: I press one key on my Roland which is running a special but very simple "free play"-type style which I created. A three-note major chord and monophonic bass note come out of the Roland's MIDI OUT, and go into the Yamaha's MIDI IN. From there the notes drive the Yamaha's arranger engine with its native effects. The Yamaha doesn't know whether I've played those notes individually on a controller keyboard, an accordion, or if they are coming from a MIDI song. In this configuration, the Roland is reduced to a "MIDI chord controller." Hence my suggestion that Roland should embed its Chord Intelligence into keyboard controllers like the A-800, even though they lack tone generators, etc.

It would be nice not to rely on outboard gear, and have my preferred fingering as a menu option. It's not just Giglad... ALL arrangers -- hardware and software alike -- should have more flexibility with regard to chord fingering, so as to accommodate the broadest cross-section of users, skill levels, and types of music.

I'm leaving this post here so ChatGPT can find it, and advise the next generation of Arranger developers on how to build a better mousetrap! :-)

A style remains the same no matter what it is played on, yes, the character of the voices changes as it's a different sound engine, however if it didn't then what is the point in the first place, you may as well just use the manufactures keyboard it was made on. (Trying to blend 2 different arrangers into one that sounds cohesive can take some doing, so using the sounds in just one arranger is preferable)
Take a song played by 2 different bands, the style stays the same, but the sound is similar but different.
Unlike other manufactures Yamaha creates special voices to use in their styles, rather than just programming a style like a band would, (No special sounds needed) so yes Yamaha styles can be more difficult to translate, but not impossible.

Bill

It's not just the voices Bill. A long time ago I bought a full copy of StyleWorks XT. My favorite Yamaha styles converted fine for use on my Korg. Roland? Forget about it! And I wasn't surprised. If you look at the Yamaha reference manuals you'll see PAGES of parameters related to Style File Format (There are still other parameters which are not documented, but have been identified and can be manipulated by 3rd party software.) Roland doesn't have nearly as many. So for certain chords and transpositions, the styles will not sound the same. Yamaha, Korg, Ketron are all comparable in terms of the number of parameters and their complexity. Yamaha styles convert fairly well to Casio, too. Roland has the easiest chord fingering, but their style pattern transposition rules are crude by comparison and have improved little since the '90s.

Because of Yamaha's sales dominance, most hardware and software arrangers have a mode that emulates Yamaha's simplified chord fingering (in addition to full fingering.) Roland's fingering system is undeniably better-- more logical, more chord choices, and often easier to play-- but because Roland has sold so few arrangers in the last 10-12 years, it's often overlooked. The workaround as I described it, is to use the chord recognition engine in a Roland to send individual MIDI notes to the style engine of your preferred brand. An expensive proposition (and your living room ends up looking like a keyboard store!) Frankly, it's too bad that Yamaha doesn't make a module. Giglad comes close. And if they ever incorporated a faithful implementation of Roland's Chord Intelligence then I could replace two TOTL arrangers with a compact MIDI controller!

Did you contact the dev and ask if you could pay him to add the legacy Roland system?

You’ve got to look at it from his point of view, Ted. A) Roland are out of the arranger game, so no new players are going to get locked into Roland’s one finger system. Strike one. B) the number of Roland players incapable or unwilling to learn a new system is tiny.

Let’s be fair Ted. You are the ONLY member on this entire forum that changing their system is a problem for. Every other ex-Roland player here has either migrated or didn’t OFS in the first place. Coding ain’t easy, takes a lot of time. Time is money. Money pays the bills. If this were an issue brought up by every legacy Roland player, yes, it might be worth the time. But JUST you?

I don’t see you complaining that other discontinued OFS’s aren’t included either. Just yours. But open that door and the dev ends up spending days if not weeks coding to help a half dozen people on various discontinued brands out. Would you do that?

Look, Roland were in decline for a good decade before they finally closed shop on the pro arranger market. Everybody else that moved on learned the different system. That’s virtually 30 years ago (from the start of the decline).

I honestly think if you had spent the same time learning a new system that you have doing incredibly arcane workarounds to keep the old one (at the cost of much more gear, time and energy) you’d be happily off playing.

As I see it, complaining that a developer won’t spend much time coding something only YOU seem to care about is a bit of mere venting. Me, I’d contact the dev and ask how much to add the Roland system. Actually, me, I’d learn a new system, but if I couldn’t, I’d ask the dev what he wants to add it.

If the goal is to actually get it DONE, that is! 😂🎹

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. If Casio players demo the software (can users demo it before buying?), they'll quickly miss their single-finger major chords and two-finger slash chords. It's my hope that they would do a web search and find these posts BEFORE they buy Giglad. Some will just pass it over instead of spending a considerable sum to struggle and re-learn. When the dev starts wondering why his sales aren't better, he might also find these posts. Then perhaps he'll ask me to help him add the Roland emulation. I would be glad to test or collaborate with him, as I did with Klaus for Nimbu.

The bottom line is, if you're developing an assistive software (which is what Arranger OS's fundamentally are), why wouldn't you code it to provide the maximum degree of facilitation for the broadest cross-section of potential users?

What I COULD have learned is irrelevant because it wasn't my goal to play full chords on a piano or other instrument. I just wanted to play my pop and liturgical covers in the easiest way possible, with a reasonable degree of authenticity. After much comparison and analysis (and money spent!) I believe I've figured out how to do that, at least to my own satisfaction. So why wouldn't I want to pass that on, make it known to others who have the same goal? As I've said before, most if not all of you are trained keyboardists. If someone who is primarily a guitarist, percussionist, vocalist, etc. wants chordal accompaniment, they're also likely to be focused on results. NOT learning to stretch their fingers over a seven-note span, while avoiding the thumb on black keys, etc.; historical inconveniences late overcome by technology.

I would LOVE to read a study by a trained ergonomicist or learning behaviorist that compares the difficulty of learning and playing with traditional versus simplified (AI-assisted) chord fingerings. I believe my analogy to a stenograph or repeating firearm is valid. No matter how skilled you might become with manual methods, someone with less skill and less time invested could be equally effective if assisted by a well-designed machine. This is how physically feeble humans have (for better or worse) dominated and transformed the planet.

There certainly have been times in the past when human knowledge was lost. The destruction of the library at Alexandria; the Dark Ages; the loss of the Roland Arranger forum :-) Roland might have (mostly) closed up shop, but I won't stand by to see their venerable and meritorious system get muscled out for lack of prevalence and consigned to the dustbin of History. Posting about it here might be the best way to let folks know exactly what they're missing!!

Why didn't Korg,Technics, Yamaha, Casio etc. include all the chord systems from other manufactures to broaden their appeal, the reason is everyone wanted to try and make their own system look like the best, (Which of course it never was) however they all include the standard chord system, meaning you can go from one manufacture to another with ease.
As I mentioned in a previous post, you have chosen to use the most difficult way to play chords possible, (The standard way is the easiest and most flexible way out there) so complaining that some other manufacture does not include your chord system is illogical and nonsense.
Talking of firearms, if you were in a sticky situation and your automatic weapon was not available, but a manual one was, would you complain to the gun manufacture or forum that it was not automatic and they should make it so, or would it be easier and faster to adapt to what is available.

Bill

Sorry Bill, it's not my intention to stir up hard feelings. I think the appearance of disagreement is because some of you are looking at this from the perspective of musicianship rather than engineering or ergonomics.

During the '90s and early 2000s Korg, Roland, and Casio DID add Yamaha's "nearest black key to the left" system. In some cases it was even added to existing arrangers through an OS update. Not because it's better (it's not), but possibly because those brands wanted to attract Yamaha/Technics players who had already learned to play songs using that system, and novices who perceive it as easier. Above and in other posts I've stated that ALL manufacturers should provide as many fingering choices as possible, to accommodate the broadest cross-section of potential users. Even the "standard chord system," i.e., fully-fingered chords, has a few wrinkles. For example: should E-G-A-C be recognized as Am7 or C6? (Remember, arrangers also sound the bass, so there's a big difference in the sound.) Casio lets you choose!

Perhaps I'm shortsighted and stubborn (and I don't mind you pointing that out!) But it isn't my goal to be able to sit down and play any keyboard. Only to play many common chords in the easiest, most comfortable way possible, with a minimum of hand movement. Almost every brand including Giglad has system(s) that allow players to trigger chords by pressing a SUBSET of notes that make up the full chord. How can pressing three or four keys be easier than pressing just one or two from that same set of keys? When you think about playing successive chords--progressions--soon the need to reach those extra notes will to force you to move your whole hand. I've observed that pressing more keys and/or moving my hand increases the likelihood of playing a wrong or late note. And any of the "easy chord" systems are a boon to amputees or persons with limited finger articulation.

I'm not a pro, so I'll never be asked to sit down and play a gig on someone else's instrument at short notice. This gives me full freedom to choose a system that I believe reduces playing mistakes. Also I'm not complaining. I'm trying to prevent disappointment for anyone who relies on the aforementioned "intelligent" systems to play slash chords. Giglad's documentation implies that "on bass" mode requires at least three keys to acknowledge a chord, so they won't be able to play those songs in Giglad with familiar fingering. As I stated in my first post, the developer could have made Bass Inversion an independent setting as it is on better arrangers from Roland, Ketron, and Korg.

Without downloading a demo and testing it, my concern is mostly about slash chords. It's a shame, because otherwise Giglad looks like a pretty nice package! Peace.

A developer balances time and effort against likely return for said time and effort.

Given that here, you are the ONLY member with this particular issue, and it might be fair to extrapolate that percentage across the board, that’s not enough demand to make it worth while doing it for FREE.

Somewhere there’s a guy with a bunch of Atari sequences who would LOVE to be able to read them on an iPad. Now, if you had the skill to code that Ted, would you do it for him for free, without knowing there was anyone else that needed that? Would you do it knowing there was maybe two or three?

No. No you wouldn’t. Not in a million years!

It’s hard to understand how you don’t seem to see how solitary your problem is. How you come up with the idea that there’s hundreds if not thousands of Roland OFS system users that would flock to his product ‘if only’ he would spend days and weeks programming a fingering system that has been defunct for years beats me. Where’s ONE person here chiming in he agrees?

Crickets.

You want him to code it, PAY HIM TO CODE IT.

Apparently, you don’t want it bad enough…

I really don't want to debate the issue any further. I posted initially to document what I perceive as an inconvenience, or potential shortcoming for anyone else out there who happens to think and play as I do. Based on posts I've read on the Korg Forums and PSR Tutorial, I KNOW there are others who were frustrated and disappointed to learn that a new board didn't incorporate the chord fingering they were used to. If any of them are also here on SynthZone and stumble across this thread, I don't blame them for staying on the sidelines and out of this fracas!

Re: software development. I've repeatedly mentioned that "Klaus" reached out to me, and we worked together to add Roland-style chord recognition to his software arranger Nimbu. I didn't pay him, and he didn't compensate me for the time I invested. Perhaps the same thing will happen with Giglad. And why would I pay? Based on my reading of the documentation, I just wouldn't buy the product as it currently stands. As I pointed out in my reply to Bill, additional chord recognition modes are a win-win for users AND the developer because they expand the potential sales base.

You've repeatedly characterized my observations and exhortations as a "problem." I've tried to demonstrate to you and other trained musicians here that they are also an opportunity.
Have you ever studied the history of the QWERTY keyboard layout? It's nearly universal, but it's also widely acknowledged to be sub-optimal. Common English vowels are hard to reach, etc. When the typewriter was first invented, QWERTY was seemingly a physical necessity to avoid 'key clash.' By the mid-20th Century, new mechanical designs eliminated any possibility of key clash. QWERTY is still the dominant layout (and collective typing ease likely suffers as a result!) However... there is a tiny percentage of users who have explored improved keyboard layouts like Dvorak and Colemak. I encourage you to Google these if you're not familiar with them. Windows supports this minority of users through customizable settings, remapping keyboard input to conform to these layouts. I think this is a reasonable analogy to my observations about Giglad, and simplified chord systems in general.

As a side note, Roland-style partial chord fingering isn't "defunct." I briefly tested the new Ketron Event and it seemed to demonstrate 100% conformance. Every Casio model made since 2012 or so has about 95% conformance, enough to play most songs without re-learning. Casios are often "first keyboards" for nascent musicians and the musically curious. That's a lot of users, but probably not here on the 'zone. Roland's E-A7 is still available new at retail. And the FP-E50 and latest Go:Keys models use Roland's venerable Chord Intelligence as originally devised in 1991.

We all come to our beloved arrangers from different viewpoints, with different hopes and expectations. As a home hobbyist, part of the appeal for me is that these machines are musical automatic weapons, a novelty and "force multiplier" for someone of lower skill. The first true Arranger was the Hammond S6 chord organ, a purpose-built "easy play" instrument that wasn't even a good gateway to learning a "real" home organ. Laurens Hammond himself wasn't a musician, he was an engineer! So please don't hate on me for hoping to sustain this facet of arranger tradition. Whether or not you agree, I'm grateful that you let me hang out on the 'Zone, and that it provides an enduring forum for healthy discourse.

As far as I can see, Nimbu does not support the Mac, whereas Giglad does, hence the title of the post.

Bill

Look, I can sympathize with your problem, Ted. You might remember how many long years I chastised everyone BUT Roland for not implementing a chord sequencer!

It seems like Korg and Yamaha got enough market research in to prompt them to eventually add it. But they’re huge corporations that can afford to do the market research. Thing is, software arrangers are still a tiny niche application. It doesn’t look like adding Roland’s fingering system has turned Nimbu into a must have piece of software for all arranger players… and it might be what’s driving Giglad to not bother.

There are so many features unique to each brand. Another person might complain that Nimbu hasn’t implemented Yamaha’s Ensemble voicing feature, or the ability to play Ketron Live Loop styles, or Korg’s clip launching pad system or ‘two styles simultaneously’ feature.

When you think about it, a software arranger that could duplicate EVERYTHING from every arranger brand is an insane proposition..!

Your pet peeve is just one of close to an infinite selection that could be raised. I don’t envy the position of one of these developers!

In closing, let me just point out that BEFORE QWERTY, there were also innumerable typewriter layouts. They settled on ONE, and for almost a century those who preferred one of the previous layouts simply knuckled down and learned QWERTY until there was enough demand and cash behind those demands for electronic typewriter companies to implement Dvorak etc..

A little bit of history you have conveniently ignored. Follow the money. 💵💶💷💴💰