I was pondering the other day (And things have a habit of just popping into my head) as to what makes something a musical instrument, and I came to the conclusion that it is something that can be played by someone and that produces its own sound, E.G: An Oboe has its own sound, a piano (Whether acoustic or electric) has its own sound, an organ has its own sound, (Pipe or electronic) a drum kit has its own sound, a synth has its own sound (An FM synth has a different sound to a Wavetable synth and so on) etc., etc. but what does an arranger keyboard produce of its own, yes it can emulate many instruments and allow the player to arrange them as they see fit, but it produces nothing of its own, so is it a musical instrument or something completely different? and if it is different, is there any point in comparing an arranger keyboard to a real musical instrument.
Look forward to uses (And anyone else) views on this, as I am in 2 minds about it.

Bill

if not , maybe it is a coffee machine

I

Arranger keyboards is for me musical instruments. 🎹🎵
It's possible to make it sound your own way, i.e by the use of aftertoutch, expresion pedal and more.
Modern arrangers has also got more authentic sound like the original instruments as it is used very natural samples.
As long as we play it fysically to create and express music, my conclusion is: It's a Musical Instrument, no doubt.
But it also allow you to use it as a pure 'playback machine'.
All that sudden it can turn into a midifileplayer or even a 'karaoke machine'.
If so, maybe it's your or other human voices that is the real Musical Instrument. 👨‍🎤👩‍🎤

Stupid question..
Worst of all, there is no relevance in the question.
Since we all know exactly what an arranger key is.
The fact if its an instrument or not?
doesnt change anything at all.

An Oboe is an Oboe, a piano is a piano, and an arranger key is first and foremost an arranger key
Under the hood its more like a chameleon
That on demand changes from organ into piano, into clavinet into synthesizer, into:any instrument with black and white keys
On top of that it allows you to emulate almost any other instrument you can think off..
And then you have a few ways to create a backing? Its like a guitarist or singer using a backing..



An arranger keyboard workstation is as it is..
And discussing if it is or is not an instrument does not add anything to what an arranger keyboard is.

Jerryghr

😮
There is no stupid or dumb questions, only stupid and dumb answers.

The question is What sound does an arranger keyboard produce of it's own that is not a copy of something else, other instruments have their own sound and are not copy's of other instruments, so what is the arranger keyboard sound, we all know what a piano is, an organ is, an Oboe is etc. but what is the unique sound of an arranger keyboard that is not a copy.

Bill

It is an instrument.. An instrument is a tool used for a function.. And Yes it can and does create it's own sound. Allows a user to edit and change the sound independent of the original (copy). Most arrangers are capable of synth control with filters , cutoffs etc.

The larger benefit of the instrument... it allows a user to bring together all the sounds in a way that the user determines..
Now that is an instrument.

Any sound you create with the on board edditors...
You can go really crazy on some arrangers like the pa4x where it comes to creating your own sounds... even the Genos is okay for that...

The same discussion could be about todays organs and stage piano’s ..

The power of an arranger keys these days, is that its a synth, which allows you to create both authentic sounds, as well as emulating sounds...

If you want to cattegorise all the above instruments, they are synths. Which means an instrument that allows you to create your own sound... hench, synthesis.

A simple question can’t be stupid..
but a question based on someone’s reasoning can be stupid, espescially when the question itselves holds much of the answer the questioneer wants to hear..

Anyway, i should rephrase.
There is no use in discussing this, as an arranger is an arranger..

Why do we humans allways want to label things?

(disclaimer: no wikipedia used - posted actual memory)

When I was studying music (at Temple in Philly) in the 70s, they taught us that there were 4 groups of "instruments". They were:
Percussion - things that need to be struck to make sound (piano is part of this group)
Woodwind - things that use wood to manipulate air to produce sound (early flutes were made of wood, so they are in this group)
Brass - things that use brass to manipulate, and amplify air to produce sound, and
Strings - obvious description.
My first question was ... "What about a Hammond organ?" Is that NOT an instrument? The books at the time all said no, because it didn't move air. The tone wheels use electricity to spin, and create a sine wave that is sent to an amplifier, and the "sound" comes from a speaker, thereby not creating the tone, itself. Without a speaker, and amplifier, it is not capable of moving air. Early pump organs, may complicate this argument, but the simple truth was - in order to pass that course, I needed to say that there were only 4 groups of musical instruments.

I wonder what they are teaching today's music students? With all the cyber, and virtual sonic choices we have - what's real, and what's "memorex?" (there's an OLD memory, huh?) Food for thought.

To me the definition of 'arranger' is some form of orchestrated auto-accompaniment. Usually with chord recognition that augments or complements the keys being played in real time. I wouldn't call the Roland DisCover 5M an arranger, nor Band in a Box software. But the tiny Yamaha QY-100 "walkstation" qualifies as an arranger IMO, because it has "patterns" (styles) and real-time chord recognition.

None of these are musical instruments by your definition, because they don't produce an original sound. Most Korgs and the Casio MZ-X500 have synth engines that allow a user to synthesize an original digital sound using layers and LFO's. They are true synths, that also happen to have a complete arranger feature set.

Some mechanical band organs from the early 20th century might be the first arrangers. They had paper music rolls, and some of them had keyboards for real-time play. These things definitely made their own sound, enough to fill a room!

So I guess what I'm saying is that being an "arranger" isn't sufficient to make something a musical instrument, but neither does it prevent something from being one.

To further muddy the water, there are keyboard-controlled devices like the accordion which are definitely musical instruments (free reed aerophone.) An accordion has robust auto-accompaniment capability, especially the more sophisticated models that have bass-to-reed couplers, etc. But no one would classify them as arrangers!

To be fair, the textbook that I studied in college was probably written before electricity became widespread in the world. There is so much grey area concerning audio, digital property, and such that we may need to be very open to some new terms in our lives. When I was teaching school, and short 4 years ago - some of my kids all thought that being a "YouTuber" was an actual job. Looks like they may be on to something. Sounded strange at the time, but there are people making a living doing videos in their homes. Go figure.

According to Wikipedia...”A musical instrument is an instrument created or adapted to make musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can be considered a musical instrument”.

In my 5th semester of Music Theory, one day our professor told us to begin making music with whatever tools we had. The class was slow to respond. A couple people started tapping pencils on their desks. One guy grabbed the trash can and started bongo'ing on it... someone got on the board and reluctantly started scraping chalk... Several folks were just taking it all in with wonderment. Then the professor went to the blackboard and wrote "Everyone must participate!" Then, some people started raising their desks 2" off the floor and dropping them back down...one guy started opening and closing the venetian blinds. Several people started clicking their fingers while others clapped. Me and another guy had a rehearsal to go to so we departed the room - and on the way out we added to the music by slamming the door so hard that it blew ceiling tiles loose and jammed the door. That was the last time we did that exercise. But it was musical!

^ I'd call that a jamb jam.

The maintenance guys had to come "unjam" the door and several of the other students (had been stuck in the room) came late to our rehearsal due to the door being stuck. Oddly, we were never asked about the door slam - most likely because the noise of our experiment took place directly over the music department chairman's office. Suspect he was happy when our tune ended.

I sat in a crowded coffee shop in the mid 80's when someone started a rhythm pattern with his coffee spoon on the table.
it took only about a minute and the whole coffee shop started in doing rhythms in different ways.
That lasted for about 2-3 minutes.
Than it abruptly stopped, everybody started laughing and went back to their busyness.
Great experience ...
Eric

Eric - yep, it's amazing how people can join in! Once on a long bus trip with the USAF Band, someone started opening and closing the ash trays on the seatbacks in our fancy cruising machine... there were about 40 of us on the bus. It was late at night and dark in the bus... then many others started joining in, flipping their ash trays open and closed in different rhythms...it went on with the cacophony growing for about 3 or 4 minutes before our bus screeched to a halt and the poor driver got out of his seat and said "One more click of the #@$*# ash trays and I will no longer be your driver". HA HA. Can't blame him but it was fun too! We all got quiet for the rest of the trip!

Ha, ha
Great story as well ...
Thanks for sharing
Eric

Nice story...

But was it musical? Or Rythmical?

Randy,

Love that story about the ash trays and the bus. Lucky for your group that the driver didn’t ask you all to get off the bus and walk the rest of the way.

Bachus - good point! Neglected to mention it above, but as I recall, the vocal majors in the class started humming and scatting a little too, which added to the "music". It was an interesting day in theory class.

Steve - in the good old military band days, we had a single driver who drove for us everywhere we went. We all loved the guy and he loved hauling the musicians around and being a 'roadie'. It was a gravy gig for someone assigned to the motor pool on base. Rally can't blame Scotty - probably very hard to drive a huge bus at night with all that clacking going on.

By the way, to help w/the boredom, we took a magic marker and wrote numbers by each the lugs on the front right wheel. Then we taped an arrow on the 12:00 position... and took bets on which number would come up at "next stop". Ha ha. The fun days. Probably played 10,000 hands of "Hearts" on that bus.

I have always considered an arranger keyboard an individual, musical instrument - JMO!

Gary

I'm with Wikipedia - anything that makes some sort of noise is potentially a musical instrument.

Whether you consider this noise to be musical is entirely up to you!