Fran,
Roland no longer has a CK division. It's all merged into one MI division. They did this over a year ago.....suprise, surprise! And the problem...........Most MI stores do not want to carry the arranger products such as the E80, E60 and E50. There are many reasons, but the best I know of is lack of salesmen understanding these products and knowing how to show them to potential customers. I do think most music stores in the USA really don't believe there is much of a market for arranger if they are high end.


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George Kaye
Kaye's Music Scene
Reseda, California
818-881-5566
www.kayesmusicscene.com

Kingfrog... If your wife feels she has to turn up with an 88 note stage keyboard, then they are hiring her to be a PIANIST.. plain and simple. And the honest truth is, were she to turn up with a 76 note ANYTHING, she could do the job just as well (or at least well enough no-one notices).

I am hired to PLAY in bands. They don't hire my equipment! If what I bring does the job, no-one says a word! Whether it is a 36 note strap-on KX-5 and a module, or a 76 note anything you like. They hire ME..

For me, a one keyboard rig is preferable to the three sided stacks I used to use in the seventies and eighties. But I have to be able to play organ parts, as well as piano parts. To do THAT well all on one keyboard it cannot be an 88 wood. Organ playing relies on speed and smears, glisses, dives and all the other tricks that are close to impossible on a wooden weighted keyboard. Conversely, piano needs AT LEAST 76 notes to be able to get the range of LH RH separation you expect (surprisingly, though, those last few outside notes are seldom used from an 88).

I believe that the performance is what drives people's satisfaction with you as a player. Not the equipment you play on. The trick is to pick a keyboard that excels at ALL areas of sound, not just being an arranger. Once you play with live musicians, sounds that can cut it against anemic drums in the arranger seldom work well against the real thing.

My take has been to weight my buying decisions primarily towards how well the sounds work in a live setting. Then make sure the built-in drums can keep up with that, for when you need them. Most arranger shortcomings can be worked around, but anemic sounds CAN'T...

The problem, and most of the prejudice against arrangers comes from two things (in a live band situation), IMO...

Firstly is that many of them ARE anemic compared to the best workstations, which are primarily voiced for live use, and secondly, and probably the most important, is that the SECOND anyone uses any arranger functions in a live setting (at the soundcheck, for instance), the defenses of every single musician that could lose his job to one of these goes up, usually in a hostile way. And who can blame them?

So I make a point of NEVER using my arranger's auto stuff in any live band situation, my G70 LOOKS like a pro piece of gear, it SOUNDS like a pro piece of gear (the piano is from the TOTL FantomX, the organ is from the TOTL VK-8, the rest of the sounds are the cream of Roland's live line), and no-one is the wiser about it's other functions because I NEVER rub their noses in it...

And in over fifteen years of using a Roland arranger for all my live gigs (with everything from local acts, to recording artists, to studio work for national artists with my G70), not one single musician, soundman bandleader, or audience member has ever come up to me and go, derogatively, 'Oh, you are using an ARRANGER? '. In fact no-one has ever come up to me and said much other than 'what are you using? It sounds GREAT!'

I just smile...

Also understand that many who snub arrangers are not aware of the pro models such as the G-70 and others. The arranger 99.5% of the time is known as "that keyboard with speakers". The whole idea of the unit having speakers for years has always been one of the main negative associations with arrangers in the so called pro arena. I've talked to many WS users who never heard of the pro "speakerless" arrangers for the OMB. So many just know the arranger as being the home models with speakers.

And, to be honest, even the speaker-ed TOTL arrangers are so low on anybody's radar that they rarely get recognized...

No, sadly, the TRUE source of most pro's animosity to the arranger (if there is such a thing - as I said, I have NEVER encountered it) is likely the LOW end arrangers. And even those probably get their reputation from the abysmal playing skills of many of their owners rather than the sounds themselves...

You see, it's all well and good to lock yourself away in a bedroom, with a machine that follows your every whim, no matter HOW bad your timing or how bad your ability to even play the chords correctly at the right time, play for a couple of tone deaf and VERY supportive relatives, and then all of a sudden, think that you ARE capable of playing with a live band

Of course, out you go with said low end arranger to sit in with a friend's band, where lo and behold! The guys in the band don't WAIT for you to catch up when you get off the chords, look at you funny when you play a solo utterly out of time with the chords they ARE playing, and then look at you even funnier when you demo the arranger's cheesy sounds and accompaniment AFTER the jam just to show them just how unnecessary they actually ARE....

No... sadly, the arranger has EARNED it's animosity in the musical community. But it isn't pros playing TOTL arrangers that have garnered that hatred (at least not in live bands ). It's your Uncle Eldred, or Aunt Maud, or Dad, bless him and his out of time AND tune bossa nova rendition of New York, New York.

PLAY like a pro, you get treated like a pro. No great guitarist is made fun of if he just blew everyone away with his cheap Peavey... [img]http://www.synthzone.com/ubbs/smile.gif[/img] Play your ass off, no-one CARES what it is on...

Amen brother!! Diki you have encapsulated it perfectly with this paragraph.

Dennis

Technically they are powerfull arrangers.... But marketing wise they are old stuff...

BUT

Its in people's minds that old stuff in this technicall consumer society can't be as good as the newly released stuff...

You mean those that read product literature and listen to obviously biased so called 'experts'?

Or those with the skill to recognize a great sound when they hear it, and realize that that is more important than the latest 'gotta have' OS feature?

They are welcome to their 'home keyboards'...

There is some pretty sophisticated stuff in even these so-called 'old stuff' arrangers that has STILL yet to be implemented in newer arrangers. And, IMHO, some of these things are ESSENTIAL day to day operations that are almost left as afterthoughts on most of the rest... What's one of the non-playing things you do the MOST? Probably trying out conversion styles, older styles, user styles. What are you the most likely to need to do? Yep... edit them.

Roland make editing styles and SMF's by FAR the easiest in the business... A great sounding arranger, that is a PIG to make third party styles sound good on is of little use unless you ARE content to play the ROM styles forever.

It's the little things that matter...

Anyone that goes with a T3 or a PA2Xpro before they have even TRIED a Roland is missing an opportunity to try a different approach. One with many advantages. Sure, they are a little long in the tooth. But in many areas, the other's haven't caught up to THEM, yet. So maybe they are not THAT old stuff after all...

People tend to trust (and stick with) the opinion of who they think is an "expert" regardless of the actual qualifications. It saves brain cells. After all, if I think that my cousin/father/uncle/friend from school is an expert, having and sharing the same opinion as he does makes me an expert too, right?

Even worse, when the "expert" happens to be ME, there is NO WAY I will change my opinion, especialy if I suspect that your "expert" opinion is what YOU personally think.

Now let's get money (wages) thrown in, and the "expert's opinion" futher cements itself in the minds of people. As said above, who's going to embrace technology that is even remotely threatening his/hers wages? Eric Clapton is not going to have a problem hearing SA guitars, perhaps he will even play along them ... but my run of the mill/weekend job mucisian cousin is going to be horrified of losing potential wages, and make the sign of the cross.

And of course, someone who saw a Casio in the early 80's and noticed the crap sounds and cheesy accompaniments, formed his opinion, and is not going to wake up in 2006 and get to try a Tyros2 or G70. For him accompaniments are cheesy. Period.

I happened to like arrangers since I saw a Panasonic something in early eighties... thought of them as compensation for my (lack of) musical training and ability... still think about them in this way, and I am happy with it. But, I never (almost) seen a review or even advertisement for arrangers when i was buying Keyboard magagine in mid 90's so I could learn about what to buy... I remember Phil Collins and someone else, pictured in an ad in the back cover, carrying a Korg T3 something, and remember thinking "that thing surely is good" but then realised it doesn't have accompaniment, and thought "what am I going to play one finger melody with?" and finally got the Casio, despite some "experts" that said "this is not a professional instrument".

I don't give a damn about what people say, especially if I think they have NO knowledge about what thy are talking about, but I wonder... how many one finger players like me have an expensive, unused T3 in the back of a closet somewhere, because they heard their "expert" uncle/father/whatever and got the "professional keyboard?"

The problem with the acceptance of arranger keyboards in the wider keyboard community is the styles and use of styles.
If the trend continues to have more styles on an arranger, and the styles are more song specific, and the styles requires the player to play less but still sound good then acceptance of arrangers would go further down hill.
Arrangers are becoming more and more like glorified karaoke machines.
If the arranger can make you sound like a CD OTB, then the logical conclusion is it is the machine not the player.

Until persons who use arrangers use arrangers to showcase their individual playing ability and let the manufacturers know that is what they want, then arrangers would keep declining and soon you would not be able to tell the difference between an arranger and an MP3 player.

I had a Roland em2000 which I bought about 8-9 years ago at Sam Ash. I went back after the VA7 was released and they told me that they were no longer carring roland arrangers since they now belong to the CK divison. So that was it for me and Roland, never bought one ever again. I did try the G70 at the Sam Ash in NYC a few months ago. but I didn't like it, it reminded me of the older Roland sound with the winey bass lines. Also I haven't really seen any roland arrangers in GC or SA for over 7 years.