Category — Electronic & Digital Pianos

Buying A Real Acoustic Piano Versus Buying An Electronic Piano

This will be a shorter post just to settle this question that is a nagging quandry for many people.

It’s the Big Acoustic Piano – Digital Piano Face-Off

Which should you buy??

Some people have the money and space for both a fine grand piano and a digital studio piano. For them I’d say, especially if you want to use piano in recordings, or want to practice after everyone’s asleep, get ‘em both.

The real acoustic grand will give you the richness of tone and subtlety of touch only a fine grand can deliver. But recording an acoustic piano can be tricky – expensive microphones, special mic placement and EQing – and a good digital imitation can sound just fine in a mix, plugged straight into your board with no micing.

But most people can only have one or the other. They have limited space and can only spend around $1500 to $3000 (you won’t get much of a piano for less than that…we’ll cover this in our “Buying New & Used Pianos” posts.) So they go to the piano store, and find that, for that amount, they can come home with either a real vertical (upright) piano or a digital piano, and they get all flustered wondering which is the right choice.

But the answer is pretty simple. It all depends on how the piano will be used.

If the piano will be played by someone who’s taking real classical and jazz piano lessons, and who will therefore need the sound and touch real keys throwing real felt hammers against real metal strings, buy a real, quality acoustic piano.

Even if the players and listeners in the family are just banging out pop music chords and melodies, not much classical or jazz, if their ears know and love the full-bodied resonance of a real piano, they’re going to notice the difference in a digital piano sound, and eventually be underwhelmed by it. So if your piano ears are very good or cultured, even if your piano skills are limited, buy a real piano

If the piano will be used mostly to learn music theory and popular songs, with less concern for classically-trained touch and fingering, by someone who doesn’t mind the somewhat “boxed-in” electronicky sound of even the best digitals, than a digital piano will be a fine choice

Especially if that same player wants more portability, less expense, and the chance to play and record lots of different orchestral and pop instruments beyond piano sounds, than digiatl is the way to go.

Simple enough? Happy music-making!

Knowing that this is a site devoted to the uniquely beautiful sound of the piano, but that not everyone, even piano purists, can purchase a fine grand, it’s worth it to look at some of the best digital imitators. Imitation is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery!

As mentioned in the last post, electronic pianos and keyboards reproduce the sound of a real piano (and other orchestral instruments) by recording the real thing digitally, and then letting the keys trigger the corresponding recorded note.

In the digital world, they call recording “sampling,” because the original digital chips couldn’t hold long recordings, just a snippet or “sample” of each note. The piano is such a complex instrument, with completely different waveforms coming from each octave of the piano, as well as differences caused by how hard you strike the key and how long you hold it, that a realistic reproduction can only come from “multi-sampling.” What that means is that the best piano imitations will come from sampling (recording) each of the 88 notes separately, with each one being sampled multiple times to record a soft, medium and hard strike, and a long-held, medium-length, and staccato-played note.

Now storing all that digital data take a ferocious amount of memory. Earlier chips simply couldn’t hold it, so piano simulators of the 80s & 90s sounded pretty funky compared to the real thing. But now, with tiny chips able to store massive data, they’re starting to sound pretty awesome.

So one way to judge electronic pianos is to say, whichever one stores the most data of each individual note, striking force and length held, wins the “most realistic piano sound” battle.
And since chips and data storage are expensive, the more realistic sounding digital pianos carry the higher price tags.

There are many brands and models of digital pianos to choose from, with price tags from as little as a couple hundred bucks all the way up to several thousand dollars. The cheaper ones usually have shorter keyboards (63 or 77 keys, instead of 88) and keys that are “organ-like”, that is, spring-tension keys that don’t allow the true range of expression you can get from real weighted piano keys. Touch sensitivity is important, especially if you’re used to playing a real piano. You need that weight pressing back against your finger to produce all the subtle differences between the softest pianissimo to the loudest triple-forte.

Fortunately, it’s very easy to compare lots of digital pianos, especially if you live near a metropolitan area. Your local piano store or music gear shop (like the national chain Guitar Center) will have a whole room devoted to the latest digital models, all lined up side-by-side for your head-to-head, finger-to-ear comparison.

If you can spend around $1200 – $2200, you can come away with a keyboard that produces a very reasonable facsimile of a piano and other instruments, with weighted keys (often made of real wood like those in a piano) that make you feel llike your playing a real grand.

Common quality brands include Yamaha, Roland, Korg and Kurzweil, and all have several models that are great contenders for best digital piano. One of my favorites is the Yamaha Motif. I’ve recorded songs using the Motif’s piano sound, and had many listeners say they thought it was a real 9’ concert grand Steinway, listening to the playback. Yamaha is the inventor of the Clavinova, one of the first and best lines of digital electronic home pianos. And since the best always uses the best, I should mention that Stevie Wonder’s digital piano of choice is the Yamaha Motif…and you know he’s got ears.
 

In the late 60s/early 70s, several British bands started mixing rock-’n’-roll with classical motifs and background, forming a new genre of music called “classical rock.” One of the first bands to explore this territory was the Manchester, England band, The Moody Blues. Their second record album, “Days Of Future Passed,” was full of extended-length songs incorporating classical expositions, and actually featured the London Festival Orchestra backing the five rock musicians. For those who enjoyed this marriage of folk, rock and classical music, it was a thing of beauty.

But it posed an interesting problem for the band. How could they take this sound on the road? They could not afford to lug the whole London Festival Orchestra around with them all over England and America.

Fortunately the problem was solved before it began by the “dreaming into being” of an “electronic orchestral instrument simulator,” that someone had recently invented…the mighty Mellotron. A completely different approach to simulating orchestra instruments using a keyboard, instead of filtering and blending frequencies electronically, the Mellotron was simply a tape-playback machine. Inside every Mellotron was a bank of 8-second tape loops, one for each key on the keyboard. Each loop of tape contained a recording of a violin, or a flute, or even a choral vocalist singing “ooh” or “aah”. Press down a key, and, depending on which instrument you chose, you got a tape playback of the corresponding note being played on that instrument. Smaller versions had just three instrument choices, but larger Mellotrons had many more instruments. And the Moody Blues had one! Indeed, their keyboardist, Mike Pinder, had worked at the Mellotron factory as his day job!

The Mellotron represented one of the first real orchestra instrument simulators that actually sounded like the real thing…because it was the real thing, just on tape! That instantly identifiable run you hear on the Moodies’  “Nights In White Satin,” that lovely D-E-F#-G-F#-D-E passage in between each line sung by Justin Hayward? That’s not real violins, that’s Mike playing those notes on the keys of his Mellotron.

Of course, if you listen closely, it doesn’t quite sound like actual violins. It sounds wavy and thin, like violins being played underwater. That’s the best a box full of triggered tape loops could reproduce in the pre-digital era. Now look how far we’ve come in just a few decades!

Early electronic (non-tape) synthesizers only allowed one note at a time, no chords, and their simulations of other orchestral instruments were weird and clearly unrealistic. Then came polyphonic (multi-note) sytheseizers and somewhat better instrument imitations.

The advent of the digital age and the ability to store more and more information on smaller chips allowed for the first true rendering of the sounds we hear from the real instruments.  Even now, the discriminating listener can tell the difference. Some instruments, like a flute or trumpet, produce relatively simple and stable soundwaves, and so their imitated versions on modern keyboards can sound pretty real. Other instruments, like strings and guitars, have very complex waveforms, and are harder to reproduce realistically.

Of all the instruments in  the orchestra, the piano has the most complex waveform, so even the finest digitally-recorded imitations, multi-sampled across many octaves and striking forces, still sounds like a “recorded piano” to an ear very accustomed to hearing the real thing.  See my next post…
 

How I Dreamed Realistic-Sounding Synthesizers Into Existence (With the help of others like me) – Part 1

The Native American Indians and other aboriginal tribes have a belief that everything in existence was “dreamed into being” by either a living or departed person or god. That is, when something that never existed before, all of the sudden comes into existence, it’s because somebody dreamed about it, and their dreams brought it into being. It’s not clear whether they thought up a new invention first, and then started dreaming about it, or the new thing was “ready” to be born, and snuck into people’s dreams to plant the seeds…it probably can go either way.

Like many children, I had an experience, several tmes, of dreaming about something unique that didn’t quite exist, and then “discovering” it when later it did come into being. And naturally I felt my dreams had something to do with that.

The great psychologist Carl Jung, had a field day with this. He believed all our minds were inter-connected as one unconscious mind. So the concept of thousands of people dreaming about something that has yet to be invented, then having those dreams contribute to it’s coming into being, was quite natural to him.
 
Certainly the greatest thing I “dreamed into being” would have to be the “electronic musical instrument simulator on a piano keyboard,“ or for short, the synthesizer. As early as 1960,  a-decade-and-a-half before Bob Moog and the advent of the first monophonic, dials-and-wires everywhere synthesizers (see below,) I envisioned a full piano keyboard that was, somehow,  electronically connected to ultra-realistic sound simulators that allowed a piano player to simulate every instrument in the orchestra. I even envisioned the multi-track layering that allowed him to play a full orchestra’s worth of music using just his two hands. I could see it all clearly, in my dreams.

Being merely a piano player and not a sound engineer, my only contribution to this was dreaming. Somebody else had to actually invent the electronic frequency filters and benders, and later, the digital-chip sampling, that would make this dream a reality.

At seventeen, I was in a rock-’n’-roll band (my fourth one already!) playing piano and organ, and singing. We couldn’t afford to bring a real piano around to gigs, and the organ I had was awful. At that time, the “cool” organ du jour every band had to have was a portable model made by Farfisa (Rick Huxley of The Dave Clark Five played one of these on the Ed Sullivan Show.)

I lusted after the Farfisa everytime I demoed it in my local music shop, but they cost about $1000, and back then that was like what $8000 is now. So I never got one. But the mock flute and trumpet stops on big theatre organs reminded me of my dream of a “keyboard orchestra”, and fed the notion that this would eventually be possible.

A few years later, I was drafted into a financially-well-backed band which had already purchased several choice keyboards for their original player (who broke his hands in a drunken car accident.) There was a Fender Rhodes Electric Piano (a very cool sound of its own, but nothing like a real piano) and the marvelous Hammond B3 organ – the king of rock-’n’-roll organs. But the keyboard they had that made me think I was dreaming awake to find all my orchestral keyboard visions a reality was…the Mellotron. They had a Mellotron! Oh my God!

Why was this so way cool? I’ll continue in my next post…