Hi all. newbie here.

This may seem a bit naive, and if so, I apologize. I'm preparing to buy a second keyboard, strictly for home use, and am trying to figure out what the difference is between an "arranger" keyboard and a "workstation" board.

As near as I can tell, an arranger keyboard is used more for a "one-man band" type operation. Although I do not do this (one-man band) myself, nor do I plan to necessarily, I still find the features of an arranger keyboard attractive for my intended purposes.

I use a Kurzweil PC2X as my performance board and love it. 88 weighted keys, very good sounds, easy layering, not too heavy and bulky...ideal for a frequent gigging musician.

But now I want to purchase a professional quality board for the home computer room, to write, record, etc... And I keep running across the words "workstation" and "arranger". They seem interchangable to me. Am I missing something?

I need/want a board with high quality sounds, easy to use "drum machine" with pres-set patterns as well as (possibly) the ability to program patterns from scratch.

One of the boards that has caught my eye is the Yamaha PSR 3000. I saw it at a store, and it seemed relatively easy to use, with pretty good sounds. The main drawback is the 61 light-weight keys...but I can live with that.

Is this board, or others like it, compatible with computer based recording/sequencing programs? I currently have "Magix Music Studio".

Finally, someone on these message boards mentioned these incredible piano samples at "soundsonline.com" from Borsendorfer and Steinway.....and they blew me away. Will boards such as the PSR 3000 work to "trigger" these sounds into a computer home studio program?

That's a lot of questions. sorry. Any responses are very welcome.

thank you.



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Dave Berriman