Thank you Chas! I think we are mostly on the same page. It's useful to compare techniques, tricks, ideas to make us better.
One thing I lot of people don't remember is that some of us are not piano players and never were. It's a totally different animal. You can sort of play piano on an arranger, but you can't very well make a piano sound like a band, or combo or orchestra or anything besides a piano. There is certainly a place for each, but they never will be the same. A BIG difference is that you can "fake it" with an arranger and do pretty well. There is no faking a piano; you can either play it or you can't. Arrangers, including Clavinova-types, have replaced home organs, but they are surely declining as home entertainment options develop so quickly. Hard to convince kids to play music when they have so many amazing gadgets to explore. Want to hear a song? Just pull up YouTube or ITunes and you've got it. Takes years to learn to do it yourself, even half as well.
I think if I had devoted the past 30 years to playing piano, or guitar, I would be pretty good at it, but I chose to embrace the technology that arrangers offer. It all started with organs as they began to add drums and rhythms. They were pretty bad, but I didn't know it at the time!
I loved playing in bands and the interaction with other musicians. I found myself fronting a very successful band every weekend, big frog in a little puddle type of situation. Then I realized I was making twice as much money playing dinner music at a restaurant by myself during the week. At that time I thought it might be time to pursue a dream to be a full-time musician, and over the ensuing 40 years managed to pull it off. I see far better musicians, far better singers, etc., that couldn't do that, or didn't want to badly enough. For me the key has been to continue to embrace new technology and do what it takes to stay relevant. Arrangers have become the key to that for me. Assuming one does not make the big time, it's really hard to make a living if you share the proceeds with band members. Now that is sad, but true.
I'm at the point where my arranger does everything I want it to do, and in fact it will do WAY more than I'll ever ask it to do.
The sad part is that, at least in the U.S.A., arrangers are barely relevant to today's music scene. I'm about the only one in this whole area who tries to do it in front of people. Even ten years ago there were a dozen or more around here using arrangers as one or two man "bands". They got old and died, or became karaoke stars, playing with "tracks", MP3s... . This is not Dallas but there are more than a half million people living in the area. Maybe two of them have any inkling of what I'm doing. Still the audience seems to enjoy it and that's what counts, and what keeps me going.
Allman Brothers Rambling Man, again.