The problem with software arrangers is that, so far, no one has put a package together with as integrated and consistent a soundset as a decent TOTL hardware arranger. As always, the goal with most players is to turn it on and it sound good out of the box. Arranger soundsets are designed with this in mind. They are also designed for simple sound swap ability. Take a rock kit, change it to a brush set, the style still sounds balanced. Take the acoustic guitar track and change it to a chorused Strat… it still sounds balanced. Go from a grand piano to a Rhodes in you RH area, you don’t have to adjust the volume. You have several pianos to choose from, often dozens of Rhodes and other E.Pianos to choose from, and they most likely won’t need you to grab the volume slider in a panic.

But that’s not how workstations are set up. And that’s DEFINITELY not how software sound packages are set up. It’s the Wild West out there, with very little volume leveling or consistency of velocity response from sound to sound. That’s not really a high priority for workstations and software sample sets other than some very barebones Sound Canvas emulators.

So, while you get access to FAR better sounds if you go the software route, you’re pretty much on your own to balance it all and get an instrument that is as instantly flexible as a well designed hardware synth.

And I’m sorry, but the whole business of guitar strumming and picking is WAY more complicated than a lowly PSR1500 could manage. Sure, it can play far more chord types than most loop based arrangers can, but they are voiced wrong, and jump around in a completely unrealistic way. Guitars aren’t linear. Because of the strings and chord shapes, you can’t use a simple lookup table on a guitar part.

Korg, Yamaha and Roland all developed unique solutions to voicing guitar chords far more correctly than the old PSR1500. And current software VSTi’s do it amazingly well. It’s stuff like this I want to see as the future of guitar part emulation. Loops are only as good as how many different types, keys, and inversions are recorded for them. It looks like the new Ketron COULD get close, but it appears that cost considerations (great session players and good studios aren’t cheap!) have made them restrict the choices. Understandably, to be honest.

But if you want to hear how good MIDI based guitar emulation has got, go listen to some AAS Strum demos, or Steinberg’s Virtual Guitarist, or Ample Guitar etc..

The need for audio loops for realism has all but disappeared.