Thing is, I have been coming here for a very long time. This forum, and I rather feel most others, weren’t ever really a hotbed of technique advice and creative use, style creation and sound editing tips and tricks.

You tended to find that mostly on single brand forums, korgforums, PSRworld, the old Roland Arrangers forum etc.

These general arranger forums tended to revolve around discussions of the latest release models, which due to the longer and longer development cycles has dropped to one or two at max every year or so. A long drop from the days if several new models cane out every year. Roland left the market altogether, and the remainders are dropping a new model only every five years or so. So, a lot less to talk about!

I think also that the worldwide recession and Covid pandemic put a fair bit of pressure on the pro end of the arranger users, and modern music keeps moving further and further away from what arrangers do best, and younger players that once would have got an arranger to gig with or home use are now moving to things like Maschine and computer driven clip launch systems, which current arrangers are only just starting to look at, with a decade or so to catch up on.

We’re a dwindling breed. I get a lot of flashbacks to the years of decline of the ‘home organ’ phenomenon. Newfangled gadgets called ’arrangers’ were coming out, far cheaper, far easier to play, far more portable, far better sounding for ‘modern’ synth heavy pop music and rock, etc.. And coincidentally, the newsletters about home organ dwindled as the player base dwindled. Not that we had the internet back then!

It’s kind of hard to hit a good balance with tips and tricks posts. We’ve got members with really basic home player skills, and others with full time pro player skills, it’s hard to balance advice for one against useful stuff for the other.

But I really feel that, if you’re looking for creative tips and a more serious approach, the single make forums are where that’s happening…