Hi Paul

Yes, by "pianist" mode I mean Scott Yee's rootless chord recognition. I probably should have said it that way. As I understand it, only Yamaha and Technics support rootless chord recognition. These seem to be the same companies that come up short on chord variations and dynamic arranger functions.

As a side note, I have come to realize that Scott and I relate to keyboards very differently. Of course, he has skill and I do not, but that is not all. He has played in Jazz Trios with a bass and drums. When he plays an arranger, he wants to play piano as he does in the trio, and have the arranger play the other two parts. He plays one part and the arranger plays the other two parts.

My more limited musical background is folk guitar, mainly pattern picking. Obviously, I chord with the left hand, pick with the right, and sing. When I play an arranger keyboard, I think of my left hand as doing the chording, my right "sings" the melody, and the arranger does my right hand's old job of pattern picking. However, the arranger picks multitimbrally. I think of myself as playing all the parts, even though I could not do it physically. I control the bass line by using chord inversions. I never use rootless chords. (I am not saying I should not explore this, but this is not how I think.)

I am trying to think this through. At the moment, I think rootless chords are useful to someone who switches from arranger playing to trio playing and wants to play the same way in both cases. It seems to me I can use the same chords that Scott does, but just play the root and get the same sounds. On the other hand, I am not sure that a full keyboard mode without rootless chords makes much sense. I wonder if some of the information we collected was taken with keyboards in full keyboard mode. Maybe someone can help me see what I might be missing here.

Another factor in all this is the sophistication of the chord recognition system. In fingered mode, the 9000Pro recognizes 35 chord forms (counting root position only). It is hard to imagine a style with different riffs for each chord form, and maybe different riffs for each inversion of each chord. I am wondering whether the keyboards that provide for Chord Variation recognize as many different chords as the 9000Pro.

Clif

[This message has been edited by Clif Anderson (edited 11-29-2000).]