You know, I am beginning to wonder why any of us pay attention to this clown of a Canadian, with his complete lack of sympathy for his fellow musicians and slavish devotion to anything that Yamaha do, his omniscient pomposity and attitude that, if HE says something is so, that is it... QED
All he offers, like ANY of us, is OPINIONS. Not facts. Mind you, I am convinced he has no idea of the difference between the two.
The FACTS are as follows. Yamaha make arrangers in 61, 76 and 88 note sizes. Calling 76 and 88 size arrangers 'pianos' doesn't make them so. A 'piano' has NO arranger features. I've got one sitting in front of me now. Strings, hammers, check... three pedals, check, a lid, check... I've looked EVERYWHERE. No arranger features at all
Weirdly, though, every OTHER manufacturer that makes an arranger with 88 keys calls it an ARRANGER. Undoubtedly, this is too obvious for Yamaha's marketing division. Soon they'll be marketing trumpets as bugles, tubas as maxi-cornets, and french horns as 'continental breakfasts'!
Not that what they CALL them is going to change what they are.
But, at least it's comforting to know that the question of 'what is an arranger' has been answered definitively by Yamaha marketing (after all, they invented them didn't they? Oh, whoops, no, they didn't
).
Anything with a full arranger engine in it is ONLY an arranger if Yamaha Marketing call it one. Otherwise, it might be a pancake, or a ballpoint pen, or a hockey puck...
Thank God, at least, that I am too far away from Ian to ever need to buy something from a store he was working in. Maybe it works in Canada, but 'Take no for an answer, we don't care what you want' doesn't work too well here in the US.
[This message has been edited by Diki (edited 09-17-2010).]