No offense, but what do you say about the need to press TWO buttons to get the Chord Sequencer to work? Roland do it with one...
Try not to get to worked up about mild criticisms of arranger design. Trust me, I've found as much I'd like to see improved on Roland's (a lot more, if the truth be told!) as I have on Korg's! It's hard to 'defend' a perceived superiority for ONE feature, if they go and break that 'superiority' on another!
My main thing about all the independent buttons on the Korg is, as I said... Roland do the same thing (and more) with less than
half the buttons. Yes, most people tend to use the Auto-Fill mode, but try to bring that up and those that want to do non-consecutive fills will go ballistic about that, or the fill loop feature. Again, something I honestly never have considered using... if I want a fill twice in a row, I simply press the Fill button or F/S (I tend to do all my selection stuff with my feet anyway, as I see no reason to stop playing to do something a F/S can do!) as many times as I want it.
So, 15 buttons to do something that MOST Roland users (except those that have got used to a far more complicated system on something else!) find no problem at all with six. Arranger users tend to fall into two camps... Operational simplicity, and operational flexibility. Put me firmly in the first. I can, without mistake or discomfort, get
any of the Roland's Divisions with the six buttons they provide. So, naturally, I see little need for 15 to do LESS...
I don't see what the problem is... if you guys can work TWO buttons to record and play your Chord Sequencer, you can do it with the Intro/Endings. You've only got USED to the button heavy method. Should Korg change to something like the Roland system, you'll get used to THAT, too!
It certainly helps not crowd the front panel...
Sieben, Korg's entire ROM style selection and pretty much most user styles I've ever heard use the four fills as two up (1-2 & 1-3, and 2-3 & 3-4 etc) and two down. Although the OS is arcane enough to provide more possibilities, outside of song specific styles (I won't get too much into how I hate those compared to SMF's!), they pretty much ALL do exactly the same thing. But for good reason... The Variations provide a gradual build from a stripped down, low energy Var1 to a full on, flat out Var4. Two fills, despite some here STILL defending that, are totally incapable of providing smooth transitions from each starting point to its destination (the one fill-up needs to work from the really quiet one to the next quiet one, AND from the really quiet one to the flat-out one... can't be done well, IMO). So Korg moving to four is welcome. But, in that usual Korg 'baffle 'em with science' OS, they provide FAR more choice than anyone typically uses (including their own style makers!), but the cost is a front panel and OS that's far more complicated than 99% of their users need.
While it's nice to THINK that you might need to be able to direct what fills are used for what transition, honestly, how many people actually use that? The widespread adoption and general happiness with the Auto-fill feature shows that, 99% of the time, all people want is an appropriate fill to smooth the transition they want to make.
Let's also point out that Intros and Endings can be called up at ANY time in the bar before they are needed (unlike fills, which often don't need to run the full one or two bars they are created with and are timing dependent), so, to be frank, having to press TWO buttons to call them up (the buttons ARE right next to each other!) is no great imposition. Plenty of time to get it right.
We all get USED to systems, but just because used to them doesn't mean that, for one thing, you can't get used to another thing. And secondly, there may be as many advantages to different systems as you think there are disadvantages. You just need to get USED to it!
Bet you are used to hitting TWO buttons to operate that Chord Sequencer, aren't you?
Look, I'm not coming here to slam Korg in any way. I LIKE the PA3X in many ways, there's much on it I like. But I simply hope that we can talk about alternative ideas and systems without getting too defensive. As far as I am concerned, just about every arranger (including Roland's!) could be improved considerably. We should be able to talk about it without rancor, surely?!
