AJ - I noticed in your post under 'advice on buying arrange' - that you play a fair amount of jazz. As strictly a jazz musician I am trying to figure out how to get an arranger to perform a task that for me is central to my needs and concept of how I can use it. I am talking to Dan O'neil and others about this - maybe you can shed some light!!

Playing with strictly an upright bass player - I want to add percussion to this mix and occasionally some backing accompaniment. But I want to have access to non-rhythmic and rhythmic intros, interludes, and endings at the press of a button. I had thought that I could store stand alone pre-recorded sequences with a particular song or song style - that get loaded into something like a performance pad when the song/song style is cued up off the disc for play. There may be other ways to accomplish this - say recording a sequence into a variation button. The trick is - I need to be able to decide ahead of time if that passage should play with or without rhythm accompaniment - maybe even its own separate rhythm. I guess the net effect is is a format which is part song style and partly prerecorded song to play against.

Can you think of anyway I might come close to accomplishing this. The point of it all is to create space in the song which is a departure from rhythm/beat - therby giving tunes the capacity to sound far more spontaneous or give one the ability to play along with far more intricate tunes.

thanks much
Mike up North