Arpeggiator

Are there any keyboards that have next to their arrangers also a good working appegiator?

I saw some awesome demos of the Arpeggiator in the new Motif range from yamaha... they have over 4000 different arpegios preprogrammed and more then half of them follow chord changes..
This way they could easilly be added to your autoaccompaniment as extra riffs following your chords(which can bring some nice changes when improvising jazz )...or just as arpegio's for a more Deejay like modern playstyle..

I almost forgot how much fun it can be to play arround with a good arpeggiator.


So are there any top arranger keyboards with build in arpegiators ?

Are there any software arpeggiators that can do things like the Motif arpeggiator ? (preferably vst's as i might wanna run them on my PC in accompany to my keyboard)

The PA800 doesn't have an arpeggiator, but it has some pads that kind of do the same thing while following chords. Not sure if anyone has developed 3rd party pads that will do this.

Yamaha MM6

Which isn't an arranger...is it?

A number of Yamaha Arrangers have PADS, these act similar to an Arpeggiator and follow chord changes. All 4 PADS can be activated if required.
I use PADS a lot to give variation to a style.

Does the new Audya have this capability?
Curious

Bill

I'm not clear what the difference is between arpeggiator (responding to chords) & style?
What distinguishes them? Isn't a style a coordinated collection of arpeggios (or pads)?
If a keyboard has styles, doesn't it by defintion have arpeggiators?

John

[This message has been edited by jwyvern (edited 05-05-2008).]

Arpegios can also be more static and not follow the chord played. Next to that the deffinition of an arpegio is a string of single notes...

[And then there is the evolution of Arpeggio's which is Karma...]

But you are correct if you say that a style is like a drumtrack with some arpegio's played allong...

There is a thin line between these things..

Actually, there is only one real arranger keyboard with real arpeggiator included that I know of, and it's not top of the line, Yamaha PSR E-403.

Vadim also mentioned Yamaha MM6, which is something between synth (keyboard with changeable sounds) and arranger (have classic Yamaha styles in 5 variations without intros and endings), and it has arpeggios.

BTW Yamaha Motif XS have 6633 arpeggios (not 'just' 4000) and about half of them follow chord changes.

The only way to have arpeggios while playing some TOTL arranger is to play it together with some synth.

The updated version of the PSR-E403 is coming this month - PSR-E413. It's not top of the line, but still is pretty cool. 100 arps (as opposed to 50 in the 403) Also has a knob for live control of filter, resonance, etc. Even has some decent "live", "cool", and "sweet" voices. Great little board as a companion to your setup... a bang-for-the-buck low-end board for only $230.

Tim

[This message has been edited by CoasterTim (edited 05-05-2008).]

The MM6 is an arranger with an arpeggiator.
It has only R&B and Dance and Rap styles and you can only load one style at a time into the user style spot from a flash drive. It has single fingered and multifingered mode, 4 variations, sync start, stop and one fill in button. It is a strange keyboard because it was made in the arranger keyboard factory of Yamaha but with motif sounds, arpeggiator, and synth knobs for real time control. There is also a 9 track recorder which can record the accomp. track plus 8 more melody tracks and you can record the arpeggiatior in each of the 8 tracks (all different arps.).


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

Thanks george i never knew that...

Allways tought the MM6 as a low budget version of the Motifs. It seems as if yamaha is realising that the thin line between arrangers and synths is almost gone...

This has got us all wayting for the first real top modell synth/workstation that has an arranger aboard (and arpeggiator or Karma)

Yamaha MM6 is something like synth with arranger functions (while PSR E-403 & E-413 are arrangers with synth functions). But at the same time it lacks some synth functions as well as some arranger functions.

There are frequent users complaints on 'motifator' forum, because MM6 is presented as Mini-MO, but lacks some important synth features, like monophonic sound, or portamento. Also, sounds changed by user cannot be saved as sounds, only as performances (along with some other changes that user might not want to change), and performances cannot be renamed.

The sound quality is also not on Motif level (ROM size is 75 MB, while Motif&MO has 175 MB) so there are just couple of Motif sounds, and the rest are PSR sounds.

Arranger users might be limited because there can be only one user-style loaded at the time, and only 32 notes polyphony might give odd sounds in live play.

So it's mix of synth and arranger, with some limitations, but also some advantages, and might be very good choice for home production , as well as live jamming of modern music.