Here is what you get and what you lose with Arranger's keyboards.


First, I would say that arranger keyboards need to be divided into two groups: home use and professional use. What determines which one is professional and which one is not is whether they have sufficient tools and sufficient quality sounds for the performing/recording musician to do his job. In other words, what many of here select is professional because most of us here actually either earn living or produce professionally in a studio.

Those professional arrangers they range drammatically from one set of features and price to another. However, all of them do not emphasize (with the except of Genesys maybe) digital synthesis of sound. They may actually have synthesis capability but not to the same tweeking power of Motif or Triton. That does not mean that they lesser quality in sounds. Top professional arrangers offer nowadays comparable set of sounds with their workstation counterparts (amazing that today they are considered counterparts when in the past they were considered inferior products).

Second, arrangers offer a concept called styles. Each style is a set of repeatable tracks of drums, bass and other chords that repeat intelligently depending on the choice of chord or note of the player in the left hand section. So If I play c major in the left hand section, these tracks will loop in C-major chord. Of course, you determine the speed. As you switch to another chord, the tracks will switch (gracefully) to the second selected chord. If you choose a different VARATION, a similar but different set of chords will play. If press "fill-in" a shorter sequence will play once before returning to the last looping sequence.

What does this mean? It means that you can perform on multiple instruments at the same time without the need to hire a drummer, a bassist, a guitarist and others. Furthermore, this can be very wealthy material to assist in recording a very complex arrangement. Finally, it is fun and a reason to encourage people to play and learn to play.