You can do pretty much anything you want with any keyboard, however it is easier if you use a keyboard that is designed for the job in hand, hence the different groups.
Arrangers are designed for the home player and thus the manufacture has set everything up to make this simple.
Workstations are designed for production and live band play, which means having everything setup (As in an arranger) is a hindrance not an asset.
Combining the 2 would be great, but no pro musician is going to pay arranger prices for stuff they will hardly ever use, and home players usually complain at why they should pay for all the in depth editing and production (Workstation) software that they don’t understand.
This is the reason manufactures produce 2 separate lines, as otherwise they would lose sales all round.
Adding a pedalboard to an arranger has been common in Europe for years, as it gets rid of the boring & repetitive bass lines that arranges produce, (A lot of manufactures support team produce USB sticks that users can purchase to set up the arranger for a pedalboard with no setup required) over the last couple or 3 years adding a second keyboard has also started to become common. (They are bought mainly by those who used to buy organs but have now moved over to arrangers, but after a time finds the flexibility of the arranger to be too limited compared to organ, but still want all the arranger features)
Bill
Workstations are sub par for bands live use compared to stage pianos, like the nord stage 2, which is superb for live keyboard use as long as you dont need any sequencing..
Topline Arrangers are curently way to expensive, just look at the MOXF, its available umder 1000 euros and has all sounds and features of the Motif XF, except sliders, build quallity and aftertouch... (If it had aftertouch it would be a nobrainer in combination with Varranger, but i cant stand keybeds withouth aftertouch)
But then, one also must admit that current totl arrangers dont leave much to wish for... But then, yamaha surprised many with the T5, i think the ensemble feature is the most innovative arranger feature we have seen in a very long time... And when you just look at the T5, what could one wish for?
- better and more in depth edditor
- touchscreen
- some knobs to comtroll parameters in real time
- better PC integration ( same as the Motif would be awesome)
- some arranger features like a chordsequencer are still missing..
- more sample ram.. Or even better, an SSD to replace the flashram..
- 8 elements/ sound like the motif
- more polyphony
- instant startup feature
And then none of those are a musthave, they are just wishes, not even supported by most players...
If they want to keep people upgrading their arrangers everytime they sell a new model, then they must add more drool features in the future... And if they want to pull the youth to arrangers, they need to do some serious promotion with those new drool features...
When you look at the Motif or MOFX, young people call the arpeggios one of the coolest features of the board.. Yet they dont seem to realise that those arpeggios are nothing but a very waterred down version of an arranger style...
I personally made the move to workstations a few years ago, but i returned to arrangers combined with VSTs, because this allows me to do what i want to do most, make music and toy with sounds. Back then soft arrangers where really underperforming, and failed to convince me... Yet these days Varranger combined with the MOFX performs stellar, for €1300 it really is tempting.
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