AJ, I'm afraid that you have missed the entire POINT about the Roland Chord sequencer. To be perfectly frank, if you have to set up a chord sequence in advance, you might as well simply make an SMF of the arranger's MIDI output in total. Fran described its' strength - it was entirely interactive. Nothing needed setting up in advance (and to be honest, I don't know anyone who ever did use that ability).

Here are a few scenarios...

Let's say you are playing a jazz song, simply the head, repeated round and round. You sing it the first time through, take solos over the rest. After playing the intro, you hit 'Record' in the CS section, and play the head while you sing (or play the melody). In the last bar of the head, you hit 'Play' and from that point on, whatever chords you played are now looped... You can now solo, both hands, another instrument, anything you want, and the chords will get input for you! You also had a choice of whether the CS would record variation changes and fills, or simply the changes (my preference, as that one chord loop could now be built and shaped at will...

Now, at ANY point, you can hit 'Stop', and go back to regular input, play a vamp, play a bridge, whatever, and then if you want to go back to the head, hit 'Play' again. All seamless, all useful, all interactive, and NONE of it set up in advance.

Let's say you play a tune, and want to groove on a vamp for a while, solo, MC, whatever. Unlike the Ketron 'Riff' feature, you merely play the chords for the vamp ONE time, then hit the loop start... Bingo! No more having to use your preset chords.

I'm afraid that I, and probably MOST of the people that DID like the Roland Chord Sequencer (and there's a lot more of us than you think!) will not care much for the feature you have described. And anyway, Korg already have a 'chord track' feature, and to be honest, AFAIK, few use it. The thing that made the Roland system so wonderful was, just like most things about arrangers, it was completely interactive and immediate.

THAT'S what arranger players want. If you have to set it all up in advance, you might as well use an SMF and drop Markers in for different sections.

Please talk to your guys, and try to point this out...