Bottom line is, is ANYONE here making a living playing ONLY instrumentals? Sure, it's fine to do a few in your set, or evening, but try playing the whole night like that, see if your crowd drops or swells... (might be embarrassing if it swelled! LOL)

Sure, play something ELSE (guitar, sax, ocarina!) and the audience has something to look at, but play an evening doing the sax solo on the arranger... meh! Boooooorrrrriiiinnnnggggggg.

But, OTOH (you know I use two, don't you?!), let's not forget the most demanding, pickiest person in your audience...

YOU!

Hopefully, you hold your act to higher standards than your audience. And hopefully, you always want to push yourself harder, reach higher, achieve more... And that is the RIGHT reason to go for new gear from time to time. But there's a warning on the label... DON'T do it unless the new gear does something RADICALLY better. Don't waste your money on a few gewgaws and little else. Don't buy into the hype, don't let amazing demonstrators blind you, don't be a 'me too' buyer.

Find something in the feature set that makes you go 'I GOTS to have that! That will make a radical difference, that will allow me to do stuff I've NEVER done before'. And don't do it until you feel you have used at least 90% of the stuff on your OLD arranger. WAY too many ditching old gear for new long before they have mastered the current one, long before they have tried all the stuff that made them want it in the first place.

Let's be honest here... how many of us with a sampler in our arrangers doesn't actually USE IT? How many never touch the style editing? How many have dropped Markers into an SMF? And then rearranged an SMF on the fly?

Use what you have fully before you move on...