As of my last post in this thread, KorgKarma membership dropped to 1470 (58 down from its peak) while we were waiting for OS 2.0 to be made available. OS2 was released on Thursday, June 14, and membership has since risen to 1481.

From an arranger keyboard standpoint, the most interesting feature to be added by Karma OS2 is the ability to change the time signature in real time. While this is useful for songs that do have signature changes, the main advantage is to provide different time-signature versions of each "style". For example, many arranger keyboards have only a few 3/4 styles. Imagine being able to access a 3/4 version of every 4/4 style on your keyboard.

The "catch" is that changing the time signature of a style would not always yield musical results. This might be a problem for those who expect a keyboard to sound good no matter which buttons are pressed. But some of us would not might learning what works and what does not through trial and error.

Another feature that might be useful for arranger keyboard jam sessions is an "auto" clock mode. At Bebop's place, we had three arranger keyboards playing at once. However, only one was being used as an arranger--since we did not synchronize the arranger clocks. It is possible to make one arranger keyboard a master and the other slaves for this purpose, but that usually takes some navigating to switch from internal to external MIDI clock and back again. The autoclock feature allows this change to occur automatically--MIDI slave mode is entered when an external MIDI clock signal is detected.

In other areas, Karma OS2 is playing catch-up with arranger keyboards. For example, tap tempo is added. Another new feature is to see the actual value of a parameter (e.g., swing factor) change as you manipulate it.

The feature the Karma community is most excited about is the ability to add new GEs, which are phrases from which styles ("Combis") are built. The original OS allowed new styles to be built, but only using phrases built into the keyboard. The original set of 1190 phrases, however, was fixed. OS2 adds room for 320 user phrases. However, we still cannot create user phrases. That will have to wait until some computer software is released.