Hi PJ:
Thanks - I completely understand what you're explaining. I kind of surmised as much. Let me be open and candid here. I'm reviewing the Genos for a magazine. I've worked for keyboard companies for over 30 years (Casio, then Ensoniq, and then Korg). I know this stuff very well from a design standpoint, from limitations, and most importantly from long-standing designs that can sometimes make it hard to modify to do what seems "easy" on the surface. And sometimes something was just never thought of, because a feature was designed for one purpose, and the designers never consider a different workflow.
This issue falls into a few of these groups I think. And one of the harder ones is that they are using SYsEx to capture/store some of the information, and no one wants to have to edit MIDI Sys. Ex. to get something seemingly simple done.
During my time at Korg I worked with our engineers to try to "humanize" working with Sys. Ex., and I'm very proud of the way we did it in the M3 Music Workstation upgrade. Let's be real - the Sys. Ex. is representing a parameter that we see on the screen, and it's written in clear English. So if the user wants/needs to edit it, why doesn't the system simply present that name again, with the correct range of values possible? It can be done, we did it for the M3. (See the attached screen shot - events 3-6 are actually MIDI Sys.Ex. - isn't it easier to work with the screen on the left versus the binary data on the right?) But it's a LOT of code to write and debug for the interface, so there needs to be a clear demand/need from the user base to prioritize that type of work over other features.
I'm not trying to spam the forum, or promote a Korg product here, just using it as an example.
Back to Genos: I actually use Step Entry of chord not to copy from a score/leadsheet, but to be able to experiment with different chord choices and even the amount of harmony used per measure when coming up with song ideas. So being able to go back and change a chord, add a few chords, whatever, is a wonderful way to experiment. Genos allows this to be done, but I think it can be improved to also allow it to happen from real-time recording. And if they were to deal with this issue (and if I'm right that being Sys. Ex. is a major part of the difficulty) then you'd also be able to insert Style changes into the Chord Track as well. Wouldn't that be nice?
Thanks for your informed input, I appreciate it!
Jerry
