All good suggestions, but having done most of the things mentioned here plus a few other tricks I still find it to be a chore to sync all of these things together.

Rikki, the problem for me is that one module just doesn't do everything the way I want to hear it.. Sometimes it takes all 3 hardware synths / arrangers I have and sometimes a few soft synths / samplers to get the sounds I want into one or a few tunes. I'll use the PA80 for example to emulate organs, synths and electric guitars, the Motif to emulate drums and bass and e pianos, the PSR2k for acoustic guitars and a few other sounds and multipad riffs..etc, then the Motif plug ins for sax / horns and more exotic synth patches, while the 2 Motif plug ins work almost independently of the rest of the board and require me to set and reset several parameters in the Motif, which is no easy chore in itself ( I love the board but the OS is a bear... ) That's before I consider working with any arps, where midi sync is a must.. Yamaha did not make it easy with the Motif..

yes Rikki, Jammmer now supports the SMPTE audio / midi type code, but if it's like it's predecessor it won't slave with a pure midi signal ( it differs from smpte ) , and the PA80 and 2k don't work with SMPTE, so... back to sq 1

OMB is a good program jos for what it does and I like it, but it's easier and more efficient to take midi loops or pieces and paste them into Jammer to be saved as riffs ( subparts of musician styles... you can now do this in version 5 ). the advantage is that I can set it up so different subparts play at random ( depending on the weights ) inside of a style instead of being locked into rigid midi data inside of each variation, similar in some ways to the way BIAB does it, but with much more instant flexibility. I dont consider styles of an arranger type as a viable option for my compositions, and while I'm quite capable of making my own, I surely don't save any time doing it that way.

BTW Rikki, there is freeware midi to style conversion program for the PA80 ( and I use it ), but again, you get locked into the same bass pattern always plays with the same drum pattern inside of one variation... not my cup of tea. Besides, I can make the style parts much fatser by playing / recording most of the data in real time inside of the PA80's style sequencer.. Mainly I just struggle a little with odd drum beats.

Frank,

As time goes on, I think the soft studio uis more the way I'm going. I have the same experience with the Yamaha / Roland soft synth stuff, but I realize that there is far better stuff out there to work with. I just need to test some and try to find out which will work best for me. I am definitely leaning more towards using soft synths and samplers though.

Thanks for the input and suggestions guys / gals. Maybe I will follow more closely the direction that Frank has gone and eventually have an AJM synth / arranger, somewhere along the lines of an FLR.. It seems more and more like the best way in my cazse anyway, but I'll always wanna have a few hardware boards as well...

AJ