As I said earlier, everyone uses their arrangers their way..!

Nothing wrong with ‘old school’, but as we’ve been discussing, some newer arrangers are making old school harder and harder to do. Fewer buttons, a shift toward using the central touchscreen for functions, an exponential increase in style and sound choices, more and more effect options etc. etc., it’s a very different world from the 90’s when arrangers were so simple, old school was how nearly everyone ran the arrangers.

But what we saw from the Event review is, old school may not be as practical as it used to be, an important consideration for players coming from say Korg or older Yamaha arrangers, that actually do have enough buttons to go old school.

And once again, Rikki, home use isn’t really the gold standard for deciding whether missing features, buggy features and incomplete data migration are important or not. No, they may not be important to YOU, but you don’t face the pressure of performing in public, and relying on the migration of data you’ve accumulated over years for your show to function smoothly. Working pros may not even have the days if not weeks you took to find your workarounds, and may rely on heavy sampler use (I have a feeling that’s an area you possibly haven’t gone bear yet, but the Middle East and Slavic countries are completely dependent on easy sample set migration).

If you didn’t rely on using the SMF to style converter to prepare new styles all the time, or any of the other incomplete or buggy sections, it’s pretty easy to say ‘I’m okay, nothing to worry here’. But other power users of the PA4x may be as legitimately in a bad position. Thing is, most of them are not posting here…

So, once again, lower your hackles, folks. Nothing wrong with how YOU use your arrangers. But just because either you still have an older arranger that still allows you to easily go old school, or lowered needs as a home user with no commercial pressure on whether the bugs, missing features and data migration issues matter, don’t try to insist that because you have no problems, people shouldn’t bring them up all the time. If they weren’t having issues you don’t face, they wouldn’t be posting about them, would they?