Main Features - Alesis Fusion Reference Manual

Main Features

Your Fusion workstation is packed with features to help you make better
music. Let's take a quick look at these features and get a sense of why
each feature is important.
Total Integration
The Fusion has one of the biggest feature lists of any
workstation on the market today. That said, the beautiful thing
about this workstation is not its sheer number of features, but
rather the perfect integration of these features with each other.
All the different parts (synthesizers, hard disk recorder, sampler,
arranger, mixer, etc.) talk to each other intelligently so that you
can focus on writing songs rather than troubleshooting why one
part won't work well with another.
For example, you can use Song mode to arrange and record
digital audio and MIDI seamlessly on the same screen. You
don't need to worry about getting a separate MIDI arranger and
hard disk recorder to work together since we've taken care of
that for you. Once you're done arranging, each of your synth
and audio tracks automatically appear on your mixer for quick
and intuitive mixing just like on a hardware mixer. Again,
everything is automatically and intuitively laid out in a way that
makes sense to musicians. Even loading, saving, and organizing
your songs and programs (which can often turn into a
troubleshooting headache) has been made completely
seamless—you can load programs from either the hard disk or
compact flash memory without ever having to worry about
what's going on "under the hood" of the workstation (if you
don't want to, that is).
Intuitive Interface
We've analyzed how musicians commonly work and figured out
ways of streamlining the songwriting process. For example,
we've minimized keypresses and placed shortcuts and quick
access buttons right where most musicians will want them.
The user interface was carefully designed for both novice
keyboard players and hardcore synth enthusiasts alike. We did
this through a two level interface design: On the top level,
novice users can find what they need quickly without ever
having to see (or deal with) the more complex inner workings
of the keyboard. On the other hand, knob twiddlers can go
digging inside the Fusion's deeper menus and program to their
hearts' content. Regardless of the type of user you are, you'll
find the interface to be clean and intuitive.
Introduction
7