As I've said before, usually, arranger design trails workstation design. That is, you'll usually see something radically new in a company's WS line first, then it gets ported over to their arrangers.

I don't see anything radically new from Yamaha lately... in fact, the latest thing to make it to the Motif line is a port of the SA voice concept, so to be honest, I wouldn't wait for anything radical to come along for a while.

Unless (sigh!) the try to go down the audio loop sliced dead end that several others are heading. Initially impressive, but a dead end nonetheless. If Yamaha want to make arrangers more realistic, they ought to stick to finding ways of making MIDI instruments firstly more real 'sounding' (which they have with Mega and SA voicing), and then, far more importantly, how the 'behave'.

I would happily go back five years of sonic improvement to get a chord behavior that doesn't jump around as you play different chords... Some kind of 'intelligent' system that looks at the LAST chord played by the arranger for any sound, and plays the NEXT one without block jumping, and just does an inversion change for smooth voice leading.

I know this is unpopular, but I, for one, would MUCH prefer to hear a less than perfect sound get played as if it were by a human, than listen to sonically perfect sound get transposed around like a jackrabbit..! That IMMEDIATELY brands it as an 'arranger' part, IMO.

Korg's implementation of Guitar Mode is one of the first things (along with Roland's Adaptive Chord Voicing - still in it's infancy, IMO) that make an effort to make the arranger play the chords as if a real person were playing them, not merely transposed little chunks of MIDI data which is what you get right now...

Mind you, given Yamaha's terror of competing in the 76 key section of the market, despite numerous customer requests, getting ANYTHING from Yamaha that you want may be moot...

My guess is that they will roll some VERY questionable audio loop capability into a T3 (and forget about easy import and importing other loop libraries - even now, ALL their sampler equipped keyboards are incapable of importing any libraries other than their own, overpriced and under-produced titles) and charge even more for it...!

Way to go, Yamaha!