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 guess I should say that again.
The audio part in all Ketron models is just a supplement to the midi which, as I have explained quite analytically, is also doing great in this area.
In Event one above this (the audio) expands to a very large extent since it also has an audio bass (Real Bass) which if we want to exchange it with the midi bass as well as there is also an audio chord (Real Chord) which is completely new and has nothing to do with the particularly limited and old Live Guitar of Audya and SD9.
Also, as Ketron has always done, here too available to the user a really huge library of new audio riffs that respond to particularly extended chords where through the Style Modeling we can have a different real chord in each Variation of course and Intro, Ending.
And let's also not forget that now enough people know how to handle computers and consequently DAW (Cubase, Logic, Reaper etc) so he knows how to handle and vst.
It is therefore very easy to create our own audio parts (guitars and whatnot) which in conjunction with the midi really makes the difference.
And for you to understand I am attaching a small video excerpt from a mainly experimental Intro audio part I made which will probably eventually be completed as a full audio style for the Event.
https://app.box.com/s/ko02ytdoe39sfn9efggn4flognaj30kpSo see what these (supplementary) audio channels can do which can (accommodate) anything that crosses our mind.
The only limitation is our imagination.
Of course this takes time and effort but the tools are here and Ketron now generously provides them to the user from day one. From then on it is up to each user to create whatever they want as long as they want.
Personally, I consider it a particularly important development and I don't think it will not be long for other companies to imitate it.
Besides, let's not forget that Yamaha also clearly hinted with those three mysterious videos with the Berlin Philharmonic and Alex Christensen from the Genos campaign that something like this was planned but never materialized until now at Genos.
https://youtu.be/jHdbmEGyyNgAt least I (and perhaps many others) have not made any sense of the company's advertisement at the time in the videos it launched the campaign with the title: Genos in action.
But it doesn't make any sense because there is neither any style of Genos in this video (if we assume that something like that was implied) nor any sound that would refer you to Genos and don't forget that I also have 4 years now the Genos thing that gives me the right to know too well (every bit of it).
I am attaching 1 of those three mysterious videos and anyone who has the patience to look through the comments will see the wondering comments of Yamaha users.
I distinctly remember a comment saying: I don't understand... I was on Yamaha's website and I saw the video that says (Genos in action) and I see all these absolutely amazing results. What does this have to do with Genos..
Further down there is still the discussion that has started that possibly Genos brings a new technology with Audio phrases..
In the end there was never any answer.. Who knows what happened. And also I don't know how many of you know that Yamaha has registered since March 2012 (and this continued with further additions to the patent until the end of 2015) a special patent for this purpose. That is, for automatic audio accompaniment.
I happen to have in my possession the full detailed text of the patent which is not hidden, it is listed on a special site but I would not like to share the link to avoid confusion.
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