posted 04-17-2006 11:03 PM            

Now, sorry for the long post:
I am thinking o leaving the workstation route to cross the meanwhile thin border to arranger keyboards for composing songs the easy way, as my job gets more demanding and time flies when you haggle with menus and stuff...

I am a guitarist with bad keyboard skills, so I use a midi guitar, means: good keybeds are wasted on me (though I feel the difference ;-)). I am into contemporary music and sound, mostly interested in R&B, latin, hiphop, jazz, but like to mingle a good chacha with - say - a triphop drum and a jazz acoustic bass, just to get the picture. March, country, hardrock I wonīt use, rather beguine, bachata, acid jazz, funk. Strange mixture ainīt it?

I posess a motif es 6 and a midjay I aquired recently to carry around as my room is really small.

My findings with the midjay:
pros: very good sounding punchy drums and single voices (brass etc.), instant access to the harddrive, reliable midiplayback, versatile concept, harddrive recording, little weight and a very helpful gerfman hotline!
cons: lacking multitimbral sound (only one dsp for two efx sections! compare that with similar priced keyboards), grooves and drumloops not syncable with styles, style edit is very limited (the sound of drumtrack 2 with sliced up waves cannot be altered. Yes, this is live sound, but at the cost of flexibility - no way to change things like in midi), 2 mp3 files cannot be played at the same time or synced (any old laptop with a freeware dj software can do that, this is not a djs tool even if called midjay.). And I canīt play it in poly mode with my guitar - I need a laptop and a software script to fix that. I think it wonīt stay with me.

My motif es: Very good overall sound, dense and well mixed. The 1.700 arps are a dream. The button concept is fine and fast to do. Then again you need lots of time to set up a pattern and finish a song but it will have your original "handwriting". And the OS is definitely a nightmare and means lots of button pushing. If you have not so much time to spend with this pros machine, you can easily get lost in the menus: Forgot how to switch on the arp on track 5? Good luck. Even with the nmanual you will take your time... Wanna load new keyfax stylebanks? Oh well...

Now things have to be done easier: No laptop - only an arranger with sequencer and a 8 track recorder for the audio.

I wanted a light weight arranger I can carry around with a fast way to edit styles - the style factory thing - and a good contemporary overall sound in multitimbral mode.
pa50 and psr 3000 came to my mind. Or a used tyros (bit bulky though).
I had the chance to test the pa50 and the psr 3000 for a very short time in a music shop far away from my home town. I know this has been coverd widely on this forum and I agree: The yammie had more and better fills and it was easy to soup up the style with four pads to fire off some short drumphrases. The OS seemed quite easy. The sound was thin, but maybe this can be fixed with the EQ? The Pa50 had a better sound to it, more punch, even if single instruments did not have the realism. And it sounded more like contemporary music. But the fills and breaks are very basic to say the least. And some people complain about the OS when it comes to editing styles or when editing sequences. Never had the chance to test the tyros 1 ( tyros 2 is ozut of my price range, pa1x is to heavy and bulky)

Do you think it is possilble to make some "original" contemporary sounding music with the arrangers I had in mind - quicker than with the motif es, avoiding the ballroom sound, without getting bored to easily cause the styles will make your music sound all tdhe same? (One note: I hardly use all the tracks of a style (strings and stuff) because to me they seem overdone anyways... but thats my personal opinion).
Has anybody here gone the same route and can share his experience?

Bluezplayer?

Thanks so much for reading this post and maybe give some advice.

Best regards
Heinrich

posted 04-17-2006 11:38 PM         

PA has better overall sound(cripsier and have more punch ,sampled at 48khz opposed to yam and rolands 44.1),much better drums,loads triton programs,seq with more features,lower price...

Both are light,But for your job -psr will fit the bill.

you can wait for mid level new E series from roland(4 varis,auto fills button -now made like yams),though I doubt them (over functionality wise,still hard to beat the most hated,but widly used KB in recent arranger world-psr 3k)

posted 04-18-2006 12:14 AM            

I would like to add:
- drums and bass are important to me. To the psr 3000 I could maybe attach a dr 880 drum machine which I rarely use because of its stupid layout for setting up chords and patterns.
- somebody here mentioned, the pa50 has subvariations of every stylepart - which gives you more drumvariation. Would that make up for only two fills?
- the e-50 roland came to my mind as well but if its styles (which it seems to use) sound anywhere near the g70, then
I do not like them: Ai I see it, they are far away from a "contemporary" sound.

Thanx for further inputs!

posted 04-18-2006 05:20 PM            

You may also want to download a psr manual & check out the onboard style creation/editing functions. I got caught with my 9000pro. I had a quick glance at the manual & was under the impression I could list edit all the tracks within a style & edit them,( which was if I remember correctly, a function in my korg i2).
Turned out the only part I could list edit was the drums. The other parts had to be
re- recorded in realtime.

I beleive it does have "Style assembly" function where you can mix style parts from various styles & create new ones.

There are style editing programs around for psr's. Free & commercial.

best wishes
rikki

http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/makingstyles/