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Hi,
I am in trouble here. I teach on a Yamaha Digital Piano , Arius YDP 240
and on a Yamaha baby Grand.

I have a new student next week and have only just learned that he will be
using a Yamaha MOX 8 synth.

what is the difference between these workstations and regular digital pianos ?

Hi Welsh Dragon - Welcome to Piano World.

You question would most likely receive the best responses in the Digital/Keyboard forum. This particular thread is about acoustic pianos.

Workstations have a greater variety of sounds and include sequencers and sometimes even digital recording. They may or may not have unweighted actions. if it makes you feel any better about it,. Elton John uses Yamaha Motif racks for his stage piano sound. The mox 8 will be just a useable as any other decent digital as it has 88 key graded hammer action.

Kurt

Also, keep in mind your student will need to connect a keyboard amplifier or monitor speakers to a MOX

... and that a Yamaha MOX would not ordinarily come with a stand or a music desk, so you'll want to see how your student has it set up. Also, there's a pretty good chance that the student will have only a single pedal (sustain) that probably wanders all over the place on the floor.

Larry.

A synthesizer is basically any electronic device used to create or recreate sounds electronically. Nowadays any digital piano or organ is technically a synth, but in the old days they were keyboard devices, usually 3 octaves, with numerous switches and sliders, and could create virtually any sound from musical instruments to wind sounds. (in old synths the piano sound was notoriously diffucult to create, and modern synths tend to use sampling to create the sounds directly from recordings from the real sound)

A workstation as I remember them is basically a keyboard with no sounds on board, or just a handful, but its keyboard usually has full post-sound controls such as touch sensitivity like a digital piano as well as aftertouch and maybe breath control. It is designed to be connected to various sound banks and devices. A good example is the Korg M1.

I think you're thinking of a "controller." A workstation has on-board sounds (the Korg M1 workstation had thousands), plus an on-board sequencer used to record MIDI performance data, enabling the user to create reproducable performances within the workstation.

I know, this may seem like more information than any acoustic piano enthusiast wants, but the pianos with player modules frequently discussed around here are actually close first-cousins.

Larry.

No, I did say that they do have some sounds on board. And I know what a controller is; I bought one once that turned out to be faulty and outdated.
I was brought up surrounded by synths and keyboards-my brother was an electronic whizz kid, always building stuff and dreaming of owning a Polymoog. And the korg m1 is a workstation AND a controller.

Most keyboards with MIDI can function as controllers. What is called a controller in the market place connotes something like the Yamaha KX-88 and so many of the Fatars that had no sounds and the controller functions brought out to the front panel instead of buried in a "MIDI" menu.

Another small terminology nitpick. Most workstations and dedicated digital pianos are not synthesizers per se. They are sample players. A synthesizer builds sounds out of component parts: oscillator, modulation, filters, envelope generators etc. It may do this in the analog realm, the digital realm or a combination of the two. A sample player always starts with a digitally encoded waveform of a real sound making device. It takes a snapshot recording of the instrument and uses that digital recording as the starting point of the patch. Of course there are a hundred variations on these themes. Many sample players have filters and envelope controls. Many synths can sample etc

Kurt.