Read on for our picks for the year’s best keyboard.

At one time Casio was the go-to name in intelligent home keyboards but there’s a lot more competition these days. Nevertheless Casio can still knock out a solidly performing portable arranger keyboard that is great value while being packed with features behind a calm and minimal exterior.

The CT-X700 has 600 sounds and 195 rhythms powered by the AiX sound engine. This ensures that all the acoustic instruments are faithfully and naturally modelled with every nuance and articulation captured. The grand piano sound is superb but the quality continues through the electric pianos, band instruments, orchestral and off into the realms of synthesizers. No keyboard this cheap should sound this good.

There are hundreds of rhythms to browse through, from world music to decades of pop and rock classics. You can build patterns and record alongside into the 6-track recorder. There are 161 songs ready for you to play along to. You can pull sounds and rhythms together into “Registrations” and store up to 32 for instant recall.

Casio’s CT-X700 is a remarkable machine, easy to use and doesn’t baffle you with endless controls. It’s been around a few years now and yet should still be a solid choice for anyone wanting to make music at home. If you’d like more of everything and bigger, beefier speakers then the X3000 and X5000 are great options if you are on a larger budget.

Street Price:
Casio CT-X700 $199
Casio CT-X3000 $349
Casio CT-X5000 $499
Casio.com

The PSR-E473 is a step up from most of Yamaha’s legendary PSR range of entry level portable keyboards. It borrows widely from the more professional keyboards giving it a fantastic sound that also benefits from pro-quality effects.

It features 820 voices, 290 styles, content from around the world, DSP effects and something Yamaha calls Super Articulation Lite. This is a technology that emulates the way different instruments are played giving you a new level of distinct realism. And the E473 wants you to interact like you would with any instrument. There are control knobs for tweaking the sounds, motion effects for getting things moving and expressive controls.

The layout is great with a robust and intuitive interface. You may notice the row of white buttons. These are for Quick Sampling where you can capture anything you’ve plugged into the aux input, whether that’s from a microphone, turntable or music player. You can even load audio files from a USB drive. With the mic plugged in you can use the on board vocal effects to smooth your voice. Or you can plug into a computer and use the E473 as an audio interface for multitrack recording and mixing.

With 61 velocity sensitive keys, great connectivity, fabulous sounds and expansive rhythms the PSR-E473 is a great home keyboard.

Street Price: Yamaha PSR-E473 $369
Yamaha.com

If you fancy something a bit more synthesizer orientated then this gem of a keyboard from Roland might be just the thing. It moves away from the perceived homliness of the portable home keyboard and gives it an indie vibe while retaining all the things we like about arranger keyboards.

First of all it’s light and portable, can be run on batteries and is available in 61-key, 76-key and a weighted (and heavier) 88-key version. It comes with over 1200 sounds, 30 drum kits with preset patterns and 64 performance configurations. There are 80 different effects, 128 arpeggios and room for loads of your own patches. This keyboard is packed!

The sounds are taken from a variety of professional Roland synthesizers and sound modules. There’s an internal Wave Expansion into which you can download new sound banks from the Roland Axial website. You can also import or capture samples directly into the keyboard including multi-sample instruments. All of which is managed via the JUNO-DS Tone Manager and Librarian software. That’s a huge range of sounds to explore.

The JUNO-DS has an 8-track sequencer for developing ideas and building rhythms and melodies. The Phrase Pad section can be used to trigger samples or entire songs. And you’ve got some great hands-on controls for sound and performance tweaking. The only thing that’s missing in the context of home keyboards are the built-in speakers.

The JUNO-DS is going to require more of you than other portable keyboards and so is ideally suited to someone who is looking to produce their own music but with the assurance of having everything ready to go in one machine.

Street Price:
JUNO-DS61 $799
JUNO-DS76 $999.99
JUNO-DS88 $1199.99
Roland.com

Roland like to call their range of arrangers “Entertainment Keyboards”. I imagine it’s because they see them as keyboards with which you could entertain your friends, or a party, or maybe people in the street, with just the keyboard and a microphone. It’s fun, it’s karaoke and it’s exactly the sort of thing you can do with any of the portable keyboards in this list.

The E-X50 is a powerful contender as the centrepiece of your gigging life, whether that’s out in the world or hidden in your bedroom. It pulls in some fabulous professional Roland sounds, has full auto-accompaniment features, built in speakers and the bonus of Bluetooth audio so you can stream music from your phone directly to the E-X50. Alternatively you can run music from a USB drive via the 12 pads on the front panel.

The sound engine begins with impressive Roland pianos and then expands into nearly 700 tones covering world music, orchestral, band, synthesizer and acoustic instruments. There are 300 music styles to find your flavour and room for 30 custom styles that you can build yourself. All of it will follow your left hand fingering in dynamic and expressive ways. There’s a whole bunch of microphone effects for feeding your voice through the keyboard.

I like how the layout makes room for the beefy speakers and keeps everything easy to see and clearly available. It looks good, sounds good and has some of the most versatile auto-accompaniment I’ve come across at this level.

Street Price: Roland E-X50 $499
Roland.com

With the Korg i3 we are starting to blur the lines between arranger keyboard and workstation. But that’s ok, there’s plenty of shared functionality and with the i3 you may find yourself pulled into more of your own creativity.

The i3 is jam packed with over 800 instrument sounds, 270 musical styles and 59 drum kits. If you call up one of the 200 soundsets you get four sounds loaded up with three layered on the right and one split to the left hand keys. The accompaniment is made up of eight tracks of pre-programmed drums, percussion, bass and other appropriate instruments so there can be a lot going on. However, you have some handy part mute buttons right on the front panel so you can thin it down to exactly what sounds good.

A lot of the good stuff is pulled from the professional Pa series of arranger workstations and so you get great variations, intros, endings, chord suggestions and Chord Buttons for triggering chords you don’t know how to play. It’s also very customisable and you can extract parts from different styles and mash them together to your heart’s content.

The workstation vibe is found in the 16-track sequencer where you can build entire songs and export them as MIDI files for working on in DAW or as an audio mixdown.

While it doesn’t have speakers it is portable and can be powered on batteries. The 61 note keyboard has three levels of expression and feels great to play. It has some excellent effects but no microphone input or audio recording, but it does have an audio player.

The Korg i3 is an understated choice that has a lot of power without the drama and bells and whistles of some other home keyboards. At $599 it’s also a great price for a pro level keyboard.

Street Price: Korg i3 $599
Korg.com

This is stretching the idea of a home portable arranger keyboard a bit because the CK61 doesn’t have the arranger bit. This is more of a stage piano but one that would make for a brilliant home keyboard assuming you just wanted to play and didn’t need the whole band to come with you.

What makes this keyboard great is that you have everything laid out on the front panel. It has a vintage style that gives you an authentic playing and interacting experience whether you want piano, organ or synth sounds. Or you can use all three because you can stack or layer up to three parts at once to give you that perfect combination of sounds.

The piano sounds come from three legendary Yamaha grand pianos and sound fantastic. In addition you’ll find nuanced electrics, vintage reeds and classic tones all the way to DX7 and back again. For organs you’ve got some dedicated drawbars for classic gospel and soulful organs, rotating speakers and delicious vibrato and chorus. And for the synth edge you have pads, leads, basses with tweak controls directly on the front panel.

The CK61 has built-in speakers and a microphone input with lots of great vocal effects making this a fabulous performance solution. It can also be battery powered, can be an audio interface to your computer and you can stream music through it over Bluetooth.

So while it’s not an arranger keyboard it’s the best home/stage piano you can buy.

Yamaha CK61 – $999.99
Yamaha CK88 – $1299.99

Street Price:
Yamaha CK61 $999
Yamaha CK88 £1,299
Yamaha.com

Right, for these last two entries we’re going to step it up to the most professional and most extraordinary arrangers out there. First up we have the Korg Pa5X. Just look at the size and form of this thing.

The Pa5X is the flagship professional arranger from Korg. It has a state-of-the-art sound engine, a full colour touch-screen interface, a customisable pad matrix, a mixer section and a completely immersive music making experience. It has thousands of sounds and hundreds of musical styles utilising the Expanded Enhanced Definition Synthesis. That means 24 stereo oscillators driving 160 voices of polyphony for stunning realism and authentic instrument expression. It’s breaht taking.

The control section is fully programmable so you can use it as a mixer or as organ drawbars, or as mic levels on an acoustic piano, or any other internal parameter. You’ve also got a joystick for multiple parameter manipulation and a ribbon for expressive interactions. The playing dynamics are amazing.

In the rhythm section you have advanced chord recognition and a huge library of chord progressions and sequences. From one finger you can have an entire jazz band riffing away with inspiring effortlessness. It will harmonise, generate rich musical arrangements to the point that you might feel left behind by it all. You can play two styles at once, crossfading between them as you transition from style to style.

Everything is ready to go, from song libraries to on-screen lyrics, from custom styles to intensive effects processing, mixing, microphone and guitar inputs and even an HDMI output to run to another screen. The Pa5X is made of aluminium and wood and looks completely awesome. It’s probably less portable than most but would look amazing in your living room.

This level of machine comes at a price but there’s nothing else quite like it.

Street Price: Korg Pa5X 61 $4,499
Korg Pa5X 76 $4,899
Korg Pa5X 88 $5,299
Korg.com

Nothing else other than the Yamaha Genos, our second flagship arranger workstation, but can it offer anything different to the Korg Pa5X?

There are many similarities. The Genos is just as huge and physically imposing. The layout follows the same idea with the massive touch screen in the middle, mixer section to the left and a whole load of buttons. From there maybe it’s going to be a matter of taste.

The Genos runs Yamaha’s most powerful sound engine where instruments are modelled down to every element of articulation. The piano sounds are taken from Yamaha’s actual acoustic grand pianos with such clarity and nuance that they are emotional to play. The drums are extraordinary with the Revo!Drum engine that offers incredible realism and nuanced interactions. From there it expands into 1,710 instrument sounds and 550 accompaniment styles and 216 arpeggiations.

There are dozens of effects taken from Yamaha’s digital consoles. Plug in a microphone and you have a whole library of processes you can apply including instant harmonies and vocoder effects. The sound engine can be expanded directly from the internet or you can push into the integrated storage or add extra USB space.

The knobs and sliders are all configurable and can be used to control mixing, parameters, changes and tweaks. The colour screen keeps you updated on every change and possibility and you can bring everything together in a single registration patch for instant recall.

The styles and rhythms are designed to intuitively work with what you’re playing. The pattern engine is sophisticated and inspiring especially when combined with the Multi Pad interface for firing off clips, loops and sequences.

Playing Genos is like entering another universe of sound. You can conjure up epic cinematic landscapes, jam with jazz musicians, interact with players from around the world and lose yourself in expressive instrumentals. You can layer up masses of sounds, build huge arrangements and keep it all under control. This is one powerful machine.

Street Price: $4,999
Yamaha.com