Used to have a Yamaha Electone HX3 for home use, plus a physically smaller HS8 for gigging. Both great instruments in their day. I regularly gigged the HS8 alongside a couple of guitarists until arrangers started to catch up with it sound-wise. Then swapped to an "ironing-board" for the convenience & lack of bulk.

I still miss the way the bass pedals gave you the on-the-fly ease of playing false roots with any LH inversion you happen to fancy.

In many ways, my ideal instrument would be a modern arranger with fully integrated bass pedals. By that, I mean fully integrated in an electronic and operating system sense - not just physically. Pedal notes would always be treated as the lowest note of the chord, irrespective of actual pitch relative to whatever LH notes were being played. That way, the pedals would always have priority control over the actual bass line, whether being manually played, or being a style derived bass riff.

This is essentially how the old Yamaha Electones worked & it felt very natural and instinctive. It also removes the need for the "bass-follow" function as it is, in effect, automatically on or off on a note-by-note basis as needed, by virtue of instantly responding to whatever bass note you choose for the LH chord you are playing at the time.

Something like the electronic guts of a Korg PA1X, with a Roland G70 operating system & touch screen, Korg i3 front panel style control buttons & an integrated 20 note lighweight pedalboard is getting pretty close.......

The Yamaha D-Deck looks interesting, and is sort of heading in that direction, but I suspect it may be a bit low-end feature wise compared to most current top flight arrangers. It may also sound a bit "home-organ-polite" in tonal character for my tastes. Oh, and Yamahas always seem to have pitch bend wheels - which I hate, rather than a pitch/mod lever.

Its no good. Looks like I'll have to set up as an instrument manufacturer to get what I want!

[This message has been edited by MikeTV (edited 05-19-2007).]