Some good stuff here. Thanks for participating...

I think that lately, there have been some promising steps forward, strangely enough mostly from Yamaha, who stagnated for a decade or so until the Genos and SX series.

I’m also surprised about the complete about face regarding keyboard size. When I was last here, the hardcore opinion was that the Tyros would NEVER get a 76, and who needed one as an option anyway?! Now you can’t get a Genos 61... 🤯

Chord sequencers were the exclusive province of Roland’s, and nobody generally thought they had any practical use. Now Korg got one, and Yamaha up the ante with one that can have up to eight named sections! And all tied to Registrations, so select your song, there are the chords, ready to go! You all probably know me as one of the strongest supporters of this feature, it’s the perfect tool to allow you style play, but freedom from the tyranny of tying your LH up with rote chord input. For those of us that started in bands, it’s almost the perfect substitute! It’s gratifying that almost the entire arranger industry has adopted the one thing I think a professional arranger should never be without! You wait by the river long enough... 😎

There’s a few things that also push the art further, IMHO, many of them gradually adapted from computer software. I’m a huge fan of the Yamaha Ensemble Mode thing. Brass and string ensemble sounds sound great when playing one note. A brass trio, trumpet, sax and ‘bone all playing together. But in real life, when they play a chord, they split up and each one only plays ONE of the notes in a chord. Same with woodwinds, same with string ensembles, you get the picture. Computer software has done this for well over a decade. It’s wonderful that it finally makes it to an arranger. Takes a tad of skill to get the best out of it, but an eye opener when you do...

We are also starting to get more realistic drums, with round robin triggering, heck, Yamaha finally made drum kits that don’t suck! They also contain loads of new hi hat articulations, and stuff like that. Unfortunately, it comes at the price of less compatibility with older styles. It’s a shame there’s no built in routine for automatically adding the extra articulations. You can tell those new styles from the old ones! But there’s quite a way to go to match the better VSTi drums. Eight way velocity splits with round robins at least! You don’t need that many kits when they kick butt!

Guitars have made leaps and bounds in styles, Korg and Yamaha’s both get strumming and picking much better than they used to. I’d still like to see a feature where the chord would be played further up the neck if you played higher up the keyboard (Roland’s guitar mode could do that) but still, all in all, nice progress.

And lead guitar sounds? Wow! Effects sections have adopted some of the best guitar amp simulators, and the sound of a clean guitar run into a proper amp, cranked up and slathered in echo is pure Pink Floyd heaven! No sampled distortion comes even close... voice it right, use the a SA2 articulation stuff, or the Roland SuperNatural articulations and it’s possible to fool guitarists! Never been able to do that before!

And, although it’s not my bag, I have heard some pretty good EDM stuff out of Yamaha’s and Korg’s, but then again, I probably wouldn’t know the difference between good EDM and bad EDM if my life depended on it! 🤩

But... and it’s a big butt 😉 What’s changed fundamentally in the style engine in years? 3-4 Intros. 4 Variations. 4 Fills. 3-4 Endings. Rinse and repeat. This wasn’t great a decade ago. Even sadder now. Styles still lurch uncomfortably from section to section, rarely transitioning well. No half time and double time options (a staple of many software drum machines), no variable swing factor, and that used to be a staple on older arrangers. The strange thing is, it’s actually EASIER to write styles yourself if you don’t struggle trying to write one fill that transitions well between two or three quite different sections. Eight fills should be base, more as options. I mean, what is it other than a clip of MIDI played from a source to a destination..? Why have we been mired in 4 Fills, or 4 Variations for decades?

So... glass half full, glass half empty. Or glass twice as big as it needs to be?! 🥃