Thing is, the weapon of choice to do most contemporary music is the synth workstation, the Fantom’s, the Montage’s and the MODX’s, along with loop software like Ableton Live and controller boxes.

I know Korg must have sunk a fortune in R&D into NEXT OS, but I honestly think that their money might have been better spent on things like Yamaha’s Ensemble mode and things like that. Now there ARE a couple of things buried in NEXT that are quite useful to the older player, there’s the touch screen sort of ‘breakdown’ thing that allows you to lower or mute parts within a style very quickly, and the thing that can add swing to simple 8-beat styles, but they aren’t really presented or promoted in a way easily grasped by older players.

It’s a shame that musically useful things like this don’t really get their own section or get a UI that presents them in more familiar ways... Most of us remember the days when arrangers and drum machines had a ‘swing’ knob! And several arrangers in the past (G1000 comes to mind) had buttons for gradually stripping a style down from full to drum and bass only, and that’s some stuff us old farts can REALLY use without having to jump through the weird NEXT interface.

I honestly have a feeling the younger generation is never going to embrace arrangers, they just aren’t really optimized for the ‘clip’ triggering and looping thing they tend to do, and they certainly aren’t when they come out of the box loaded with music categories like Ballroom and Oldies!

I’ve long held that an arranger loaded with ONLY hi tech contemporary styles and sounds might sell quite well, but there hasn’t really been one of those since the old Casio Rapman thing back in the early 90’s. Korg’s problem is that they won’t commit. In the back of their minds, they probably know what an uphill battle that would be, and how they might alienate the existing base.

Come on, Korg! Just give us older players stuff we can use! What percentage of your base plays EDM..?!