Biswajit
It is a coincidence that you should post this topic at this time, as for that past several days I have finally got around to auditioning all of the arps in my two latest Roland keyboards. I've only had them for a year, but perhaps what I am about to say will explain why it has taken so long to get to this. Things came out pretty much as I expected. For the most part, I have come to the same conclusion as you and Y-man. I would say that we must be missing something except for the fact that this in now the fourth or fifth forum that I know of where this topic has been discussed - and always with the same conclusions. As an example, one of my Rolands has 128 preset arps. Out of that 128, I found ONE that I might be able to use somewhere sometime. Like Y-man, I found the guitar arps horrible. The flamenco stuff was pure noise and the rest, instead of adding realism, just screamed FAKE with their mechanical monotony. I was prejudiced at the outset from the Motif-XS6 I owned some years ago. It boasted some 6000 arps, which I abandoned auditioning after 50 or so for the same reasons. So, since so many of us feel this way, what is their point? Why do the manufacturers spend money to include them? Are they just a cheap-shot selling point? At this stage, I really don't know. Maybe we are missing something. I do know that I downloaded several dozen new arps that came along with a sound expansion pack for that Roland, so I decided to give it one more try. Their was a group of 6 or 8 arps that made absolutely no sense at all. So, I started trying them with each of the new sounds I had downloaded, thinking there might be a key there somewhere, and there was. When I hit the east Asian ethereal New Age sounds, I struck gold. The arps sounded wonderful and just blended themselves right into the sounds. Obviously, those arps were made to go with those sounds, but there was absolutely nothing to indicate that. Without the arps, the sounds were still useable, but without those particular sounds, the arps were useless. So, I now have to wonder if that might be the problem with all of these arps. Were each one of them included to go with a specific sound, and unless you make the proper arp/sound match, it sounds bad? Who has the time to match 2500 sounds with 6000 arps to see what goes with what, or for that mater, to match 1900 sounds with 128 arps? This reminds me of a similar situation back in the late 80's and early 90's. Scuttlebutt among keyboard players was indicating that a lot of keyboard sounds, particularly pure synth sounds, were seldom used. It turns out that many of these sounds were included to make a particularly distinctive sound from one popular song, so the local band could sound just like whoever. The problem was, once the sound was removed from the song, it lost its identity and was no longer identifiable as "that" sound. That is why some keyboards now come with a sound auditioning or preview button. To give you some idea as to what the manufacturer intended for this sound. Maybe we need something similar for the arps. Instead or just demoing the keyboard, maybe we need some demos of the arps - which ones go best with which sounds in which situations. I know, a lot of arps are labeled piano or ep or guitar or strum, but that doesn't seem to help much. I have finger picking guitar arps that sound better when assigned to a grand piano voice - even better than the actual piano arps assigned to a grand piano voice. Just some thoughts !
