I try not to respond to Scott Reed’s cynicism but in this case he is right from a technical standpoint. He just says it in a very repulsive way. And, it is the same thing John C and Larry G had already said.

We are talking about playing an arranger keyboard. Most of us use an arranger keyboard because it takes our limited knowledge or talent and can make it sound much better than we could otherwise play. If we didn’t feel we needed that added support we could just play a piano or a simple keyboard without all the frills like APC, etc.

Some of you may remember Scott Yee’s comments about “rootless” chords and the problems we have trying to get an arranger keyboard to interpret those chords properly.
When we are playing from a lead sheet we don’t have the luxury of knowing what was intended with the original composition. All we see is a single note melody line with some chord symbols at the top. When we see one of those “rootless” chords it creates a dilemma. If we have a left voice selected and worse yet, if we are using Technichord, we can’t play a C7 chord (for a C7-9) because we miss the “sound” that we want. So, we play a diminished chord, which the arranger keyboard can understand. We get a sound that is acceptable to most of us even though it is technically incorrect. And, the resulting bass line does not have the root note in it. That is the primary reason that I brought this subject up.