The day they come out with an arranger that sounds and plays as good as a real drummer, the day they come out with an arranger that sounds and plays as good as a real bass player, the day they come out with an arranger that sounds and plays as good as a real guitarist...

That's the day I'll go solo and not look back.

In the meantime, any of you that think your arranger DOES sound and play as good as a real musician... I'm sorry, but you just must not have ever played with any good ones

Let's put it this way... Do you think that the keyboard parts in your arrangers styles play better than you? Most of you will probably say 'not'. Sure, they keep good time, but they have no inventiveness, no imagination, and most of the time, can't even do decent voice-leading, yet alone spontaneous reharmonization. And they ALWAYS play it the same way, every time you call up that style...

And yet, some of you are SO happy to play with drum, bass and guitar parts that suffer from exactly the same problem. Most of us can tell an arranger being used in a song as soon as the Intro stops, and the loops begin. That isn't how it is supposed to be. For the arranger to be a viable competition with a real band, not economically but 'musically' (you know, that thing that we musicians are supposed to care about ), a lot of this 'dumb robot' behavior has to be programmed out of the OS's we currently have...

In the meantime, I'll happily keep using arrangers... Got to feed myself, after all But I'll NEVER try to persuade anyone that it is 'better' except in that one area.

MONEY...