While we always appreciate input from vendors, care must be taken to not go overboard!

28 inserts? Think of it this way... each Keyboard voice uses an insert effect (or at least many do, I’m not that familiar with Yamaha architecture but ever last Roland tone does) but if you want to use a sound you are familiar playing in a style, it needs its insert effect to sound the same. I don’t much care whether the factory programmers have gotten around to using the feature much yet, it’s something I do to everything I use on my Roland. The right phaser on a Rhodes part, the perfect amount of compression on a bass, the use of an amp simulator on a clean guitar rather than those awful sampled distortion abominations makes all the difference. To not have enough to do all the style parts if needed makes for more work scrambling to find alternative sounds that don’t need inserts to sound ‘close’ but never perfect.

This is where Yamaha, Korg and Roland used to be (or still are, especially in Korg’s case). Yeah, 28 is a bit overkill, but I’d rather have too many than too few!

As to polyphony, yes, I know about the restriction for the extra polyphony being for the expansion packs. But with most, those expansions are going to have the main sounds the player is playing, especially polyphony hogs like grand and electric pianos and layer sounds. No offense, but if you can’t hear polyphony issues when you play with a 128 voice arranger with a busy style and a piano/string layer, you aren’t playing enough! Separating the polyphony seems like a decent compromise if the synth architecture can’t handle 256 across the board. Sure beats 128 for everything!

Yamaha are in no way unique in not expanding the style engine’s capabilities much over the years. Truth is, all the hardware arranger makers have pretty much settled down to a tried and tested formula. There’s a degree of compromise between capability and content. Sure, I’d love it if styles had an infinite number of variations, fills and breaks etc., but I’m not sure we’d be getting the degree of new content if making styles turned into a nightmare with at least four times the work needed for one style!

In the end, for the vast majority of arranger players, the provided content is the alpha and omega. The cost of providing it is factored into the arranger’s cost. Now triple or quadruple the cost of the content (the style creators DO get paid, right?!) and watch sales plummet. It’s all well and good to concentrate on only the software end and take potshots at those that create the hardware too, but the economics don’t add up unless you think that the ever dwindling arranger market is capable of absorbing these extra costs. Personally, I don’t...

Groovyband’s solution of a marriage between custom software and established hardware works well, but currently it’s a one manufacturer solution. Are you prepared to be as soundly criticized for not getting around to adapting it for Korg or Roland arrangers or even their workstations, as you criticize those manufacturers you rely on for not expanding their style engines? Cost/benefit problems cut both ways!

To be honest, the most exciting thing I read was the future marriage of Groovyband and a PROPER audio/loop/synth workstation and proper style engine. I have long given up on expecting the manufacturers to do it themselves, and honestly, I don’t think there’s a hope in hell of the hardware of arrangers ever being able to catch up with where workstations have gone!

But where is the Roland Jupiter version, or the Nautilus version? Or is it that commercial pressures impact you as much as Yamaha? 😂