Hi Scott

There is an obvious chicken and egg problem here. Musicians who would require rootless voicings cannot have been playing arranger keyboards very long, since arranger keyboards prior to the KN-5000 did not have this feature. Thus, Tom's poll shows that not many arranger players use rootless voicings. So the fact that only a few people use rootless voicings with arranger keyboards is not surprising nor indicative of the future.

I think Yamaha and Technics will benefit from their early support of rootless voicings. First, they will attract musicians who require this feature; second, those musicians (who tend to be relatively skilled) will serve as good word-of-mouth advertising for those companies.

However, evey manufacturer has different "crucial" features and targets a slightly different group of musicians. Some require audio loops, e.g., for drums, some require vocal processing ala Roland's Variphrase, some require dynamic accompaniment (which Y and T both lack), some require multipads. So manufacturers missing one market might be hitting another dead on.