The chicken and the egg? Hardly...

Arranger manufacturers already have their current demographic well and truly covered. What remains to be seen is whether one of them has the foresight to try to EXPAND the demographic. Because the elderly OMB is hardly a growing concern. As traditional organ sales has shown us, when you pin your sales model on a dwindling, aging market segment, all you can do is diminish. And eventually all but disappear.

Ketron, because of the audio drum loop feature, have an opportunity to produce styles that transcend the built-in drum kits. And to do them quickly (while the sounds and styles are still contemporary). While they appear to be willing to put the work in to provide CONTEMPORARY ethnic music styles for niche users, I ask again... Why not tap that vast ETHNIC American market ( ) as well?

And don't think for one minute that the Ndomolo and Zouk styles are as dated as most US styles are. I would be very surprised to find that out. All we are asking for is US styles as contemporary as their African, or Portuguese counterparts... Mysteriously, the style makers seem to have no problem keeping up with the ethnic music trends. Why should it be any harder keeping up with US trends..? Ketron seem somehow able to afford the cost of expanding the style library for these niche markets. All I have said is, if making styles that are modern for THOSE markets makes sense, why would making them for the much more affluent US market NOT make equal sense?

That should still show you something and thats that there is no arranger market in the US as
it is somewhere else, those companies are not stupid that work that way, trust me, i worked
for few of them on few projects, i know personally how they approach at this. We can scream
as much as we want WE ARE AMERICANS WE ARE THE GREATEST but for arranger market
we cant even compete to the poorest east european country, whichever it is. Its reality, they
know what they are doing, they go where the money are, there is no money and sales for them
in USA. Now you gonna ask me why i said that about us Americans above, you know exactly
why, thats how your post sounds like, like we are the stronger market for arrangers or biggest
and you still know that we are probably the smallest. They wont create nothing for USA, it is a
waste of investement for them, they wont sell here, its not as big as other places, Portugal itself
can cover the whole US with arrangers, forget the rest of them. Why do you think everything goes
there first and we are always the last thing in the picture about anything? Cuz we aint that great
as we think we are...we are just big on words which they dont really care, they want big sales and
money which is not happening for them in the USA but in other countries.

Sorry, Nedim, Take another read of my post. Slowly.

I never said that the US is the largest arranger market. I said that, with all the wealth over here, it is POTENTIALLY the largest market. But until arranger manufacturers start addressing OUR needs as diligently as they do their current, most successful markets, it is NEVER going to grow...

You can hardly expect Americans to start using a product that doesn't meet their needs, just so that, in the future, the manufacturer MIGHT get around to it. Remember the 'Field of Dreams'...

If you build it, they will come.

They sure as hell aren't going to come until you do...

The failure of the arranger market in the US has nothing whatsoever to do with American players. We have the same number of fingers, toes and ears as players anywhere else in the world. The failure lies SQUARELY at the door of the arranger manufacturers, who appear to be more concerned with pandering to small niche markets that already exist, than trying to address the needs of what could POTENTIALLY be their largest market.

God never worried about the 'chicken and the egg'. He simply made the egg. And the chicken followed.

If arranger manufacturers never even TRY, the chicken will NEVER appear. Sure, it costs money to make the egg. But there's a boatload of people buying keyboards in the US. Don't they want a piece of that action? Basically, the US share of the arranger market will never grow, until the arranger manufacturers make something that they like.

The ball is in THEIR court, not ours.

You are completely right about that but people and bussineses tend to go after
whats already there, not to start to create something anew when there is something
already. Take me as an example, my heritage is Turkish, i grew up in Yugoslavia,
today i make my living out of the Arab and Greek musicians and lately Westerners
in general. When i saw that happening at the begining i left my own community,
my own crowd and market, i saw i was good at this new communities and then i
started working mostly for them, to satisfy them and not my own community for
which i can probably do better things. But i decided to leave them instead of investing
in them and then waiting for something to happen. Once in a while i PopUp with
something new and good for my community but they are nowhere, its dead, same
this with US in the US, maybe they dont wanna take a chance, it still goes back to
the chicken and egg, who Starts first, WE or THEM? In my case was THEM and
i just followed them, till today i dont know if i was the chicken or the egg...

Are there really no young arranger players in the US ? Actually there are thousands but they dont call them arrangers because they dont like the name. And they dont play arrangements , they prefer to call them Arps. Yamaha are already testing the waters by integratng some arranger functions into their workstation instruments hence the styles that have been incorporated into the MimiMo , the MO and the XS .

The market is there but it needs to be approached differently thats all.

The difference, spalding, is the control paradigm...

For instance, on the MotifXS, probably the most 'chord following' of all the WS's, there is no way to trigger loops as fills in the arranger sense. That is, you can, on an arranger, drop into a fill DURING a bar, and everything will stay in sync. On the MoXS, you either have to cue the fill up a bar in advance, or you are out of luck.

What arrangers have is a very natural, musical approach to triggering loops (that's all styles are, really - little MIDI or audio loops that follow the chords), but we have no really contemporary sounds and styles. The WS's, OTOH, have very contemporary styles (that's all loops are, really ) but a completely unintuitive way of triggering them.

First keyboard that combines the two cleans up, in my opinion. It can be an arranger company if they make the effort. Somehow, though, I doubt it. And next to 'home organs' from the sixties and seventies, in the Museum of Obsolete Instruments pretty soon will lie the 'arranger'.

From Nedim's reply, it is obvious that arranger manufacturers are only concerned with their existing markets. While WS manufacturers are concerned with innovating and GROWING their market... And it weill only take ONE WS to adopt the arranger control paradigm (software loop players like Live already allow you to drop into fill loops like arrangers do) and everybody will drop arrangers faster than a hot potato...

Trust me Nedim... your market did NOT come looking for you. YOU went to them, provided the service, and THEN they came. That's how it works. Nobody buys a truck if they want a minivan. You have to build the minivan before they will buy it. And the arranger manufacturers have to build a contemporary arranger, before that segment of the market (young musicians with money$$$ ) will buy one. You can't expect them to buy things better suited to their grandparents, and just HOPE that better styles are developed...

This is the way I see it.

Although slow, manufactures do keep an eye on the market, and if they just looked at this forum they would all write off combining Arp's with Arranger control as a total waste of resources. (Fortunately they take a much wider view)

Why

Well what you are on about, can already be done on open keyboards like the Mediastation, (Including Audio) but a lot of folks here that say they want the Arp's and Arranger facilities combined, are the first to run the keyboard that can do it down. (Remember whatever features are available on hardware are also available in software, which can be loaded into open keyboards like the Mediastation to give you exactly you want)

The future you so crave has been here for years, but few of you are prepared to leave your current comfort arranger zone and embrace it, and because of this the big boys see no market that they can make money in.

The manufactures (Particularly smaller ones) provide all sorts of forward thinking tools, however it’s up to the uses to get off their backsides (Butt) and create the market for them, not the other way round.

Regards

Bill

One thing that needs to be thrown in to the mix is the difference between the way traditional players use arrangers and the way younger players use arps/styles/loops.
Traditional players are more passive in that they just want to play songs that have already been made. Contemporary players are more creative and active players and want to make their own songs and not necessarily play what is already there.

I am sure Yamaha and Korg are testing the “young person arranger market” with some style functions in their Motif xs and M3 offerings.

If they get feedback with players saying that they want more ways of controlling the arpts/loops live, then maybe they would consider putting more “live style features” on their. But with out that, there would be no incentive for them to do that.

Remember the whole purpose of an arranger is to sound like a band. An arranger is there to substitute for a live band.
Is contemporary hip-hop and R and B being performed by live bands?
Not really, most of the contemporary hip-hop and R and B are performed in clubs and other establishments by a DJ. When it comes to contemporary music, could an arranger replace a DJ.

And for those who do not understand the chicken and egg scenario, it is the question of which one comes first. So for example, do you need the egg first so that the egg can hatch in to a chicken? But how can you get an egg without having a chicken (chicken lay eggs). But there can not be chickens unless they came from eggs. And you see how you could just go in circles continuing with the thought process.

Asking arranger manufacturers to make styles for a market that is not there (hip-hop and r and b) is like asking Workstation manufacturers to make more big-band and swing ARPS/Loops where there is no market for that.


The fact is there is no quantifiable proof that contemporary hip-hop and R and B styles are wanted on an arranger.
Workstations are covering that very well.


P.S if one really wanted to play hip-hop and R and B live on the Yamaha motif XS, while it may not be the same operation as a fully functioning arranger with styles, but you could do it with patton and patton chaining and the performance mode.

I dont know but its complicated, i talk to Jerry, Malcolm and Paolo from Korg,
people from Ketron, i had an offer from Roland talked to them too, they, all
of them agree with what we are saying (i know cuz i talk this same thing to them)
but it seems like Abacus says, they have a wider view on this, they see and say
the same as us but on a different level, they are more slower, calmer, why i dont
know, they seem to be just taking it easy, i cant get it why.

Look, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniac didn't have scores of people coming to them and going 'you know, we would really like a small 'home' computer'. Nobody even imagined it could be possible, let alone think of the possible use for such a thing. They simply built it first, at considerable cost and risk to themselves, and the rest is a slice of Apple pie history.

The market did not EXIST until the product was built. The egg came first... This is what keyboard manufacturers need to acknowledge. Unless they build it, there will NEVER be a market for the product.

And, I'm sorry, but the MS does not count. It has the HARDWARE to do what needs to be done, but is still basically without CONTENT. Why is that important? Because, if you tried to sell a MotifXS with NO loops and arps already provided (but only the capability to make your own) they would sell in a tiny fraction of the numbers they do now. Our WS brothers are JUST as hooked on provided content as we are...