"It seems this is very good! good price too but it seems more for Dance than acoustic- definite cool new design"

Not to be an ass, just it seems almost anything thats not defined as an arranger around here gets the "only good for dance and or hip-hop" treatment. Kinda odd given we have artists that have transposed classical work with modular synth's.

"I think the acoustic instruments on this unit are going to be good. The sounds are supposed to be complete overhaul based on the QS series, and the QS series has great sounds."

Exactly I tried to express the Fusion wasn't just the QS series ported right off. Plus this was stated in the namm demo and on the official site from day one.

Can someone help me here, because I haven't read anything about it yet - does this board have "Arranger" features or not?

Jerry
Amsterdam

It is not an Arranger but it does have looped based tracks that can be used as an accompaniment along with the user's lead playing. You are able to use up to [eight] 8 tracks of Audio using the onboard Sampler and recording tracks one by one. You would create the accompaniment by playing the Sampled parts yourself using different instruments on the Keyboard e.g. Grand Piano, Bass, Drum, Synth, etc. (up to 8 instruments/parts) and after each instrument part is recorded all of it would be looped, i.e. playing over and over. You could then play on top of the 'arrangement' to play along with your looped samples. It is similar to other Workstations in that regard. E.g. Triton Extreme, Fantom X, etc. I think the ease of it is what may separate the Fusion from the others.

So no Arranger but it has the ability to use instruments as accompaniment but not as we think of an Arranger using Styles, etc. I'm not sure either if the Arpeggiator on the Fusion has Chord recognition like the Motif ES does.

And these are 'Audio' (not Midi) loops/recordings and can be recorded AND played back at 24bit resulting in very lush sounds.

Digital I/O's to play back the 24bit audio and USB 2.0 connectivity to transfer to and from a PC make the Fusion all the more enticing not to mention Compact Flash support plus a host of other cutting edge features. The Fusion may finally be my 'keeper' Workstation. And at such an attractive price, Alesis is sure to sell a boat load of them, if indeed the Fusion turns out to be all they're touting it to be.

Best regards,
Mike