Regarding the seemingly high prices of pro arranger keyboards;

One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is the coast of manufacturing. I am not just referring to the hardware manufacturing, but also the software design portion of manufacturing.

An arranger keyboard shares a lot with what is commonly known as a workstation keyboard. It has keys, wave tables, knobs and sliders, display, etc. and also the software to make all of that function. But in addition to those things, the arranger instrument also has additional hardware in the way of arranger control buttons, sliders, etc. not to mention the styles themselves.

Anyone who has created their own style "from scratch" realizes just how much time and hard work it takes in coming up with a good usable style that will sound right no matter what chords are used to trigger that style. And since most arranger instruments these days have over 200 internal styles on-board, that means many hours of work to put the styles together.

It has been mentioned in other posts within this thread that manufacturers need to approach high-end arrangers as professional instruments. What about the retail outlets? In my position, I travel the US providing product training to digital keyboard dealers, both home and pro stores. The high-end arranger keyboards are typically displayed in among the rest of the “lower priced, easy play, one finger chord, yes your 4 year old can learn to become a concert pianist with this instrument” type keyboards. Store employees need to become more familiar with the true capabilities of the pro level arranger/workstations so they can better serve their customers.

And the current professional consumers of high-end arranger instruments need to realize that as long as comments like “the price to too much” or “it is too heavy” etc. are being tossed around, then many of the so-called professional level arrangers will continue to be made out of plastic, with cheap keys and controls, poor MIDI implementation, etc.

BTW: The Genesys is an all metal chassis with wood side panels. It uses a high quality keybed featuring full length and width keys with weights added to the underside of each key to provide a more solid and playable keyboard. The 32 track sequencer features full editing capabilities, much of which you would expect on a computer based sequencer program. The MIDI implementation goes beyond many of the workstation keyboards on the market. The point is the basis of the Genesys has grown from professional synthesizer/workstation instruments versus being based on an upgraded version of those “lower priced, easy play, one finger chord, yes your 4 year old can learn to become a concert pianist with this instrument” type fun machines of the past that many other products have been based.


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Wm. David McMahan
Nat'l Product and Support Manager
Generalmusic USA
GEM Community Forums

[This message has been edited by WDMcM (edited 08-28-2005).]