Most arrangers have a specific channel used to trigger the arranger engine. Internally, the arranger does this in the background, and you usually get a choice of Left, Right or Whole keyboard as the note recognition area.

But using an external keyboard or a DAW, you have to set one particular channel as the NTA channel, and then it makes no sound from that channel, it simply goes to the chord recognition engine.

The basic idea is, you record yourself playing the guide track (simply play the chords in their correct inversions, nothing fancy, no arpeggios just block chords) and then edit that track in the DAW, hard quantize it so everything is PERFECTLY on time, then set that Track to output on the NTA channel. It now drives the arranger section rather than you playing it. And because you edited it to be perfect, now your arranger output will be perfect..!

Read the manual with regard to NTA channel, and you will also have to clock the arranger from the DAW while you do this (it’s usually better to clock the arranger from the DAW than the other way round). Once you have the DAW controlling the arranger engine, you simply send the guide track to the arranger and record the MIDI out of the arranger to a DAW MIDI track set to record ‘all’ channels (or whatever your DAW calls it) and you will now have a ‘capture’ of the entire song, with all the different Parys on different channels.

Once you have this, now you can go to town editing, changing sounds, using better VSTi sounds like drums and piano, strings etc.. Or you could use the arranger output as a ‘guide track’ for you to play your OWN parts and replace the mechanical ones.

I like to do a fair bit of editing to the drum track, for instance, and will usually go in and edit each of the fills so they are never identical (a sure giveaway of arranger use!) and changing a few random things around, etc.. Humans rarely repeat things EXACTLY no matter how good the player is, and if you want a human ‘feel’ you have to edit those aspects into the arranger output (or replace it completely!).

It’s been 45 years since my college days! I like to think I’ve learned a few things since then! For starters, no DAW’s and arrangers back then!

Look, I know it seems like a lot to learn, but break it down into little exercises (set up the DAW so it records multi-channel, record a short chord sequence in the DAW, learn to clock the arranger from the DAW, learn how to quantize the guide track etc.) one at a time, and DON’T try to record a whole song right from the start. Practice it like you practice a scale or an arpeggio. Once you can do those, THEN you can tackle a whole song.

Trying to create before you have all the basic tools mastered is very frustrating, and makes a lot of people simply give up. Wait until you have the process understood before you even THINK of writing anything, and you will have a much less frustrating time… 🎹😎

Thank you Diki. I will do one step at a time. I just learned the other day to record audio with the BK-9 thru a Yamaha MG-10XU mixer via USB into the Pro Audio 9. When I did the recording I played the keyboard with a MIDI drum track that was played from the Pro Audio9, when I re-played the recording the audio was late couple of milliseconds. I went into the Option and Audio and there was a button to configure the sound card of the PC, or something like that. After that I did another recording and the audio was on time. Was this some kind of latency issue? I even fired up my second BK-9 thinking that the DAW was freaking out the PC's sound card and used the second BK-9 as a sound module with a MIDI cable from the PC, while the first BK-9 was used to provide the audio signal (left and right output) into the mixer(audio interface) and into the PC. It worked, question is -> Is this a bad practice what I did?