Team,

I am sure by now most of you know that there are some keyboard manufacturers out there that do 'tap' into this forum from time-to-time for informational purposes. I thought it would be wise then to use this forum to let them know what it is that we really would love to see in arranger keyboards. Ofcourse we won't get all our wishes in one machine but seeing how competitive the market is today, I believe keyboard manufacturers will have no choice but to pay closer attention to what customers would like to have rather than what they THINK customers would like to have.

So far, I believe we have seen some drastic updates and improvements PLUS the willingness to coorporate with customers. KETRON's recent software fix to include rootless chord recognition for the SD1 ... and possibly to be further included in the X-serieds too is just one of many changes you can obviously see came as a result of a request from a consumer. They need our business to further improve on their products and stay in business. We need their business to ...well, stay happy and content with our instruments (and have some time away from the wife!).

Without requesting for a recording studio in a keyboard, what are some of the "I wish my keyboard had ..." features you would like to see in say your next generation keyboard?

To start, I would like to see:

* Storage on say CD-R.
* Cabability to edit into styles parts of CDs (where I can delete a voice(s)tracks from an existing CD and insert just the instrumental parts of the song into a style. The catch is rather than playback in the recorded key (SD1 already incoorporates this), I would love to playback in a similar fasion to they way we control todays arrangers. So when I change a chord, the 'new' parts should change along with me.
* Be able to independently vary the lengths of the ARRANGER parts per style plus have more than 1bar for the fills/break.
* Having the option to allocate memory as you see fit. So if you want say more samples, you can delete some of the (eg) styles you do not see yourself using and use that space for your best samples.
* Have mor features attached/assignable to the DYNAMIC ARRANGER (i.e when you press the keys harder/faster, you can access VOLUME, MODULATION, FILL INs/BREAKS, AUTO FILL INs, Auto-Keyboad-generated-loops [whose length you can set], temporal/permanent switch to another style etc ...)

Some of these mentioned above might already exist ... but they are just some of my thoughts. What does everyone else think?