To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Sokratis creates styles. For a living. Most of us don’t.
But nearly all of us have at one time or another tried using a slightly different sound in a style, change a Strat to a jazz guitar, an acoustic to a 12 string, a banjo to a mandolin. A rock kit to a jazz kit, a pop kit to a brushes kit. With most non-audio arrangers this is easy. And utterly IMPOSSIBLE with an audio loop.
Some of us had a song to play that needed a slightly different kick drum pattern. It doesn’t take long to move the hit to the better position. Nowhere near as long as creating a style from scratch! Again, impossible with a loop.
As I alluded to earlier, claiming that you can always substitute a MIDI guitar pattern for the audio one you want to change will OF COURSE result in an inferior sound. If it didn’t, there would be no benefit to the loops in the first place.
We’ve had audio loop arrangers for over a decade. They have still failed to address the issue of limited chord choice and ineditability. It’s hard baked into the process.
Don’t get me wrong, if you’re the kind of player that wouldn’t know how to finger a diminished chord or an augmented in the first place and want something that sounds amazing, Ketron seems right up your street. But what bothers me is, this thing seems designed and priced for people with a high degree of technical skill, a desire to use loops and the knowledge of how to do so. A true ‘musician’s musician’ tool. A highly technical, advanced arranger with true 21st century features. Designed and priced for the advanced professional and home player.
But without the ability to use chords that the majority of ‘musicians’ musicians’ would want and need from time to time. That’s a fundamental issue that not even the beginner player would accept in a traditional MIDI arranger, but somehow Ketron want us to accept in something that is TOTL priced. If a Genos or a PA5X couldn’t play extended chords, how many customers would buy one?
Ketron is gambling on ‘most of them’. I have my doubts…
I want to break this down again so the average reader reading this does not leave with the impression that an AUDIO Live Arranger such as the forthcoming EVENT is limited to playing/recognizing limited chords.
"But without the ability to use chords that the majority of ‘musicians’ musicians’ would want and need from time to time"
In the case of the AUDYA and SD9 Pro, there was no room to create nor input new Audio Guitars (or other Audio) that can respond to chord changes, and so the above statement is valid for those units only. This has been vastly updated in the EVENT such that the limit is only due to lack of KETRON, 3rd Party Style creators, or you the user inputting the chord variations. I know for a fact that with EVENT, KETRON is going more than just chord tonalities of major, minor and 7th. Again to clarify, the EVENT is capable of responding to ALL chord changes within ALL keys. The limitation is populating all the chord tables with content which either KETRON or you can do (in the case of AUDYA and SD9, only KETRON and some of their engineers like us could) and thus these units did have the limitation the above writeup is alluding to.
Thanks
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