I'm afraid that the minute Yamaha put a Bossa Nova preset into the XS, they will lose about 25% of their target audience because no self-respecting hiphop player is going to want to play anything that 'old fogey' guys are going to like...!

It's kind of like how the most popular new music is usually determined by how much their parents hate it! The more you hate it, the more they like it!

Seriously, though, although the XS has some 'intelligent' chord recognition, it is a completely different way of using it, to trigger arps and drum patterns that, yes, with an enormous amount of work you COULD almost get arranger-like capabilities, but it is not going to come preset like that.

Unless Yamaha spend a fortune re-voicing it and redoing all the arps to be able to handle more 'arranger-like features' such as Intros and Endings, Break/Fills, dedicated fills between 'scenes', it's only going to appeal to a VERY small minority here that still play to the MUCH younger crowd.

As we can see from the posts on this thread, most of you are concerned mostly about whether it behaves just like a 'real' arranger, or wanting to see cha-cha and waltz styles demoed. PLEASE.....!

This end of things is already MORE than dealt with by the Tyros line. Why would Yamaha spend a fortune (and alienate all the urban, hiphop types!) by turning the XS into a Tyros?

If you don't perform primarily to youngsters, this is NOT the 'board for you. It's a great workstation, and I'm considering getting the module version just for the SA voices to work with my G70, but I can't see putting in the MASSIVE amount of work needed to change it into an arranger that us older guys could use....