Just a few musings, but I have often been left scratching my head by seemingly obvious bad design about features on arrangers. There are times when I have to think that there isn’t a player of arrangers at the head (or close to it) of the design team.

I know we all got our long list of head scratching moments in every design team, all of us coming from a background of actually PLAYING them. How these obvious errors slip through the design path and QC process is hard to believe, if they are designed by actual players.

I suppose that a large degree of the problem comes about because product design and coding is a young person’s game, the vast majority of people working in the field are probably in their 20’s or 30’s. And that must cause problems, as that is not the generation that uses arrangers (on the whole) or grew up with them.

It’s hard to imagine a guitar being designed by someone who doesn’t play guitar, but more and more, we seem to face arrangers designed by people that obviously don’t play them.

The danger, as I see it, is that it’s a self oscillating feedback loop. A poorly designed arranger sells poorly, and attracts fewer and fewer people to the type. This reduces the budget for future designs, which means even less experienced designers, which means even more poorly designed future products.

I think this is what happened to Roland, and to be honest, I see the beginnings of it happening to Korg. I am not familiar enough with Yamaha’s to comment, but I’ve read some complaints about design decisions that probably a player wouldn’t have allowed to be designed in if they had any input.

So, what’s the remedy? Are arranger design teams so divorced from actual user input that they run the risk of alienating their already shrinking base? Should arranger design teams (not the PR or sales divisions) make greater efforts to reconnect with those who actually use arrangers?

Your thoughts?