....and what do they want in an Arranger keyboard? First of all, (respectfully) Bachus, by his own admission, is not your typical Arranger player, either home OR Pro, so although HIS wishlist is long, creative, all-encompassing, and well thought out, it sounds far more like a STUDIO WORKSTATION GEEK SQUAD list than the wishlist of the average Arranger player. Donny is 100% correct in saying that most arranger players have little or no interest in sound editing (they buy the instrument because they LIKE the sounds that are already there), DAW integration, etc. As Bill (Abacus) has pointed out repeatedly (and I do mean REPEATEDLY ), most arranger buyers are 'home players' who mainly just want to 'open the box, plug it in, and PLAY). I'm guessing that Yamaha also knows this since they've done pretty well so far on just glitz, hype, strategically timed feature releases, and great marketing. Hey, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it'.

Along with Donny's (above) observation, here is another similar one that intrigues me. People get carried away with these professionally produced, flowery, ethreal, exotic DEMO'S, using sounds, layers, combi's, ect. that we would never, ever use in real-life playing (home or gig), and we (well, not me ) immediately put it on the top of our must-have list, sell our hardly-explored previous model, deny our wives any frivolous purchases for the next six months, and then rush off to make our annual donation to the Yamaha heirs trust fund. The truth is, as Uncle Dave pointed out, most of us use about 6-10 voices of the thousands available, 95% of the time. We even choose styles which use the same limited voice pool. I bought a cheap kb controller recently that came with thousands of VST's and VSTi's. Although I had fun listening to them, I realized that I would probably only use about 15 of them; most, I couldn't even imagine a use for. But then, I only paid $149, not $5-6000. But hey, this is America; if you got it, spend it (even if you don't have, charge it ).

In the words of one of our esteemed members, "your thoughts?".

chas