To the layman, a $700 piano and a $7000 piano look pretty much the same.

We as arranger players are faced with a dilemma… if you want a ‘button per function’ type arranger, it’s going to look like the flight deck of the Concorde, if you want a simple aesthetic, you’ve got to use pedals, footswitches and a bunch of registration programming to enable you to make complex changes on the fly.

And, to my mind, no one has yet designed a touch screen interface for an arranger that gets it right. Korg’s is too small, Yamaha’s is better, but then they wasted most of the screen real estate with huge pictures instead of a customizable display that puts the functions YOU want where you want them. Roland’s used to be decent but a bit small, and it still suffered from not being able to present a custom layout, so some things like the ending ritardando button were on pages that weren’t quick to get to.

But, all in all, I like the stripped down aesthetic more than the Concorde approach. And as for plastic black boxes thing, my back appreciates them! And I think I would rather the audience concentrated on me, not what I’m playing… And, let’s face it, unless in a theater tyle venue, the audience’s sight line doesn’t usually encompass the playing surface. So what they think of it ain’t my concern!

Big touch screens are the way forward, but designers got to stop making them pretty, and let a REAL arranger player design the layout, not a graphics designer!