Just on a whim, I was in the area of West LA Music yesterday and stopped in. I'm noodling on some of the new boards and the sales guy comes over and demonstrates a new Korg M3. Fantastic doesn't begin to describe what this thing can do. Since we're talking about horns, I had him go into the horn bank. It has everything you can imagine, all the solo instruments plus sections plus a whole bunch of physical sliders that can be used to mix and add parts to a section in real time while you're playing. He's a good player and was doing many different styles from Glenn Miller to Tower of Power. The unit is also an arranger so he set up the proper backing for each demo and he did it literally in a second or two. It has 9 sliders, two rows of knobs and they all control parts of the arrangement in real time, adding or subtracting instruments, changing the mix, all kinds of stuff. The thing that just killed me was when he picked a solo bone part and started layering sections to it, then reached to his left where there's a 4 inch ribbon controller. He swiped the ribbon to the right with his finger and the horns swelled, not simply changing volume but timber as well, putting that brassy edge in there as they got louder and reducing it when he moved his finger to the left. It was the most amazing synthized horn sound I've ever heard and he did it basically effortlessly. I took over and without knowing anything, got some incredibly good stuff out of those horns.
Do I now have serious GAS? You bet I do. I used to sell arrangers many years ago and this M3 is so far ahead of anything else I'm familiar with that it's not even funny. Even the 6 inch touch screen is an instrument. He hit one button and turned the screen into some kind of controller, put his finger in the corner and wiggled it and created a rhythm effect. All the new keyboards have killer sounds so it's not worth it to even talk about that anymore. It boils down to control and all I can say is that M3 is simply amazing.

Bob

Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.