Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Two Questions About Digital Pianos

Hello all,

Just ordered the Casio PX-330, it should arrive in the end of the month (out of stock)... Meanwhile I studied a bit about DPs in general, and I have 2 questions:
1) If you take a relatively simple digital piano like the PX-330 and download some soundfonts of a high-quality DP into it (say Roland FP-7), how would it sound in comparison to the Roland, particularly with a headset?
2) Is it possible to store downloaded soundfonts in the PX-330, so that one could use them without it being connected to the PC? If not, what well-known DPs do have this feature?

1.) Probably worse than the Roland. If I understand that correctly, thoese sounds are gained by sampling DPs, which have sounds sampled from a real piano. And sampling samples isn't such a good idea IMO.
2.) No, I think you'd need to get a sampler for that, and i don't think any DP has that feature.

Kind of a moot question. You can't download new samples. Very few DPs have that feature.

What you can do is connect the piano to a computer and load samples into the computer. If you go this route the sky is the limit There are literally many thousands of samples to choose from and the software that loads and plays those samples varies from "very simple" to very complex.

If you want the download samples directly into the DP then you are looking at high-end keyboards along the lines of Yamaha's Motif

OK one other option: Some midi sound moduals connect to any midi keyboard (not "USB MIDI") and these units, some of them allow downloaded samples. But the cost is high. You could buy an Apple Macbook for llelss then a Yamaha Motif rackmount modual

well, if you know about soundfonts, you probably have an audigy card or somethin.
connect the dp's usb midiout to your pc and have it play the soundfonts.
you mayyyyyyyy be interested in my lil midi sequencer.
it'll load soundfonts per song and such (the sequencer kind of "knows" soundfonts)

Just found this page within casio's music site - http://music.casio.com/e/data_ex4/
It seems that they have what they call "tones" you can download to your instrument, as long as you have one of the specified models.
I wonder if it could work on a PX-330 too...

I downloaded the "BRIGHT PIANO 2" file and the "MODERN EP+E.G.PIANO 2" file. Each file is only 134 bytes long!

I doubt these are new piano voices. Rather, they're probably just a bunch of tone control settings.

Unfortunately, I have an onboard soundcard. I got to know about soundfonts about 8 years ago from a friend of mine who was into this stuff, and back then had a costly creative soundcard.
Now that a digital piano is on the way, maybe I'll buy a good soundcard if I'll see that I'm into music sampling and all this fancy stuff.

It states at the top of the page what keyboards support those tone files:

WK3300
WK3800
WK8000
PX410R
PX575R

Rich

You're right Rich, but I wonder if it would also work on a PX-330, because I guess their operating system and internal file system shouldn't be so different. But that's just mere speculation.