Ian, have you ever taken a look at the ratio between total arranger sales (in your area) and the number of people you do clinics and lessons for?

Let's be optimistic... Say about 10% (that's still a LOT of clients!).

You are basing your opinions on the dumbest 10% of the total sales figure, NOT all arranger buyers. It would be easy to slip into the assumption that MOST arranger users can't figure out or use any of the more advanced features, if the only people that come to see your clinics are precisely the people that COULDN'T figure these features out for themselves...

Maybe more than 10%, you say? OK, then... But until you give clinics and talk to over 50% of the total arranger sales in your area, you are still talking about the minority.

It's kind of like the remedial teacher who goes around thinking that kids are dumb. Rather than the gifted child teacher, that goes around thinking that kids are quite smart. You tend to assume the majority are like the minority that you actually deal with. The truth is, kids vary. Some are smart, some are dumb, most are average. Setting the world up for the benefit of the dumb ones penalizes the majority, not just the smart ones.
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But to get back on topic, I just feel that, unlike Domenik's Linux version of the future, that the future as designed by musicians will have all the complex features we all want. But they will be designed to be totally transparent to the user...

Few of us ever think carefully about what is going on in the background in the arrangers we already have, things like different patterns for different chord types, how a fill smoothly flows from one variation to the next, etc.. It just happens. All of the ideas I posted earlier here should fall under the same category. While the technology behind them is quite fierce, we will be completely oblivious to it. All we will realize is that the auto accompaniment SOUNDS so much more realistic than it does now, more in tune with our musical intentions, but we will have no more knowledge of it's inner workings than we do of our current keyboards.

That is the way it SHOULD be. You don't have to know how to build a piano to play one. You just know that nearly a couple of centuries of skilled craftsmen and engineers have labored so you can sit down and just play. Domenik could learn from this. If you had to build a piano before you could play one, there would be few pianists!

So, to Domenik, and to all arranger designers, I say this; HIDE THE TECHNOLOGY.... but keep putting more and more in. Figure out how to make it automatic, transparent, invisible. And spend a LOT more of your time on ways to make the sounds play less repeating phrases than making the repeating phrases play better sounds. The sounds we have now are more than adequate, but the repeating small chunks of music (the styles) could be FAR more variable, even with today's technology, with little or no more complexity to the player.

THIS is the future of the arranger.... I hope!

JMO, yada yada yada.....

[This message has been edited by Diki (edited 10-13-2007).]