Hi, I was wondering whether anyone here has any experience with converted digital pianos?
For those who haven't heard of these before, the idea is to take an old piano in need of restoration, and pluck the strings out and insert the electronics of a digital piano. The appearance of the piano is the same, so it's not visible to the naked eye that the piano is in fact digital. But it now works in the same fashion as a digital.
There are a few guys here in England that do this, e.g. www.valepianos.co.uk

What i'm wondering is, how do these compare with the likes of Kawai CA-111, Roland LX-10 etc? Are there any common pitfalls? etc...

Thank you in advance,
Jan

So in the end you have a 350 pound digital piano that requires a dolly with wheels to move?

One big advantage might be that the piano action is certain have the same feel is the old acoustic piano. If that is good or bad would depend on the piano and the skill of the technician.

The sound would be computer based so it could be very good if you like Ivory, Pianoteq or whatever.

A lot would depend on the cost. You can buy a very nice digital piano for $2,500. I would not pay more for a converted acoustic.

Thanks ChrisA,

As I see it, if one is in the market for a digital piano that doubles as a nice piece of furniture, the best option is probably the kawai ca111. It looks lovely! However, it retails in the UK for around £3700, which i find quite steep.

Now, if i can bring in an old piano i pick up for "free" and get it converted for £2500, thats a bargain, so long as the sound, action, etc is comparable.
Regarding weight etc, the ca111 weighs in at 97kg and an upright without all the stuff inside prob around 150kg -not a huge difference. I think it sounds like a great idea.

However, what im not sure of is how commonplace this is, has anyone had any good/bad experiences? Anything in particular one should look out for?

Cheers

I'd worry about the action on a free piano. I've played acoustic uprights that are not as good as my Yamaha DP. Old pianos get worn out and that is usually the reason they are offered for free. When the repair cost is greater than the piano's fair market value, "free" is very attractive to the seller as he'd otherwise have to pay to have the old piano hauled away. I think you need to add the cost of any repair to the cost of the conversion.

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I know Vale Pianos, an excellent company, but I don't think the piano conversion was intended for buying in an old piano and converting it, it's more for the people who already have a much loved piano, family heirloom perhaps, which they are reluctant to make into firewood. as ChrisA says you lose the portability of a regular digital piano due to the weight. I'm not sure what the price of the conversion is and don't they replace the action with a new digital version, Vale are Kawai dealers I'm guessing they might fit a complete Kawai DP with wooden keys into the piano, just guessing though, I'm probably wrong..again.
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So far, no one has expressed any experience with such a conversion. I wonder if you've tried one of the other forums? People in the Tuner/Technician forum seem to have many contacts in the business. Maybe one of them can offer some insight.

I have been pondering the same question for quite some time. I have an acoustic grand which is too loud for my room and very harsh in the 5th octave. At one time I considered installing a MIDI-strip and stop-rail, using the MIDI output to drive my software piano (Ivory), but the technician who does that sort of thing couldn't bring himself to hack into my RX-3. Also, I had to face the prospect of getting a suitable set of loudspeakers to create the "surround-sound" experience of my acoustic.

At the time, early last spring, the Avant Grand was being touted as the possible answer to all my problems, but as the reviews come in, I can't see having a fancy digital piano and being tied down to one preset. I'm waiting for Yamaha provide a down-loadable set of presets so that I can choose the piano that suits me in my room.

It seems to me that if you found a technician to finish the cabinet and install the acoustic keyboard with the MIDI strip and stop-rail (PianoScan even includes a piano preset I believe), then with a loudspeaker set of your choosing, you'd be done. Even this rudimentary system would cost at least $5K I'd guess. It is awfully tempting to try it, particularly if one were willing to connect to a computer for the full array of software pianos.

I wish I had the nerve to try it.

I just looked at the site linked to by the OP. It appears they do gut the piano action and drop a new digital keybed into the old piano. So all you are left with of the old piano is the shell.

Or to put it in other terms. You are using an old piano to do the same job that could be done with a $80 "X-Stand". All you get with the conversion is better cosmetics. But to many people cosmetics is very important.

Chris, wouldn't you also have the option of playing with the speaker placement as they have done in the Avant Grand. Is there nothing to be said for having the speakers directed at the open lid and having sub-woofers underneath the frame? Based on the reviews of the AG on this forum, it seems that its major advantage is the speaker placement and the acoustic keyboard.

Yes, I think so. The old case would make a great speaker cabinet and allow space for some nice large speakers and a good size amp.

The problem is the price. A custom cabinet shop could build something like that from scratch for less them half the price of the conversion. Yamaha will sell you a complete DP in a wood-like case for less. So this conversion has to be just for the person who really wants the look on an antique piano and is willing to pay a premium for it.

Seems to me that if you want a real upright piano case, expensive built-in sound system to sound like an acoustic piano, and a piano-like action, why not just buy a new upright piano? Especially if you're willing to sacrifice the portability of a digital piano and pay several thousand for the conversion -- after all that's why many of us opt for digital pianos. Portability and cost-effectiveness. Seems that they cancel each other out in this case.

I saw this done in an Evanescence video. Even she couldn't pull it off without looking like a talentless hack.

dewster, how about MUSE?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhi7hlIyjqQ

Cheers,
James
x

Interesting. That's a custom job I presume?

The problem with this in a performance situation is that people tend to show up to see virtuosity. Any doubt as to whether the musicians are actually playing tends to ruin that.

Yes. An RX-5 grand piano cabinet with an MP8 retrofitted inside, and lights triggered by MIDI events. The conversion was undertaken by a UK-based company - they did a beautiful job.

However, to return to Vale Pianos, they actually prepared the white upright that MUSE use as an alternative to the grand (e.g. when tight tour schedules mean it's impractical to transport such a large instrument).



Sorry, I'm afraid I don't follow you - can you elaborate?

Cheers,
James
x

On the DVD, the Evanescence gal looks like she is playing on a real acoustic grand piano in front of a large audience, though her hands are somewhat hidden from them. The behind the scenes footage shows it to be a gaffer tape hack job with a silver DP of some sort just sitting in the wooden shell. At that point I wondered if what she was playing was what we were hearing, and her performance dropped a couple of notches in my eyes right there. Also, she either couldn't hear herself very well or she relies rather heavily on a vocal harmonizer in the studio (I would guess the latter) as her pitch was not that great.

Many years ago I saw ZZ Top in concert. At one point both of their guitars were spinning on their belt buckles, but I could still hear guitar & bass pounding away. Made me wonder if I heard even a single note live during the show. I came more to see them play than to see the rotating guitars.

Delay pedals. You play the guitar and tap the pedal and it records, a couple seconds (5 or 10) later the delayed sound goes over your live playing. It does require some skill to be able to improvise with this. The trick is keep dead-on time so the delay comes out later on a down beat seamlessly. It is almost exactly the same concept as going to a canyon and singing a duet with your own echo. (He'll spin the guitar as the echo comes back.) It really is an echo effect pedal but with a really long delay.

I think Billy Gibbons competence as a musician is beyond question. He'd make anyone's top five list of Texas style blues guitarists (Rummer has it that are recording again but going back to a cleaner blues sound.)

If we want to talk about hacks. My daughter was watching Hanna Montana. I watched her left hand hold a G major chord for an entire song. I wonder if that guitar was even plugged in. But at least they did show the half dozen studio musicians who where backing her up. Have to give Disney some credit for that, others keep those guys off stage.

I don't think it is quite that simple. Portability and cost-effectiveness are not the reasons DPs are of interest to me. For one thing I had to choose my acoustic grand in a dealership environment which was totally unrelated to the acoustic space in which it was to live. Once I got it in my house, room acoustics came into play and it was too loud. The worst of it is, that once in my room there there was little I could do to make it better. Visit the Piano forum some time and search for "piano too loud" and you will see that I am not alone.

The beauty of the concept of the digital piano is that it should be completely customizable to one's acoustic space. My piano of choice would be the Kawai RX-3 keyboard in a smaller Walnut Satin grand piano cabinet, a stop-rail and MIDI strip (i.e PianoScan) driving a software piano (i.e. Ivory) into a speaker set that was chosen to fit within and reflect off of the woodwork using some sort of adaptive equalizer to account for room acoustics. Except for the uncertainties with speaker selection and placement, I think it is all doable for a price less than that of the Avant Grand, and in the end, I'd have an instrument that was completely flexible and upgradeable.

If someone could suggest how to go about the speaker selection and placement problem, I'd be willing to give it a try.

I guess your plan is to mount the speakers on a board where the soundboard normally sits in a grand piano?

If you pick decent drivers and design the crossover correctly, you probably wouldn't need much in the way of equalization.


Lord, I just have no idea why something like this doesn't exist already. Anyone with enough get-up-and-go can DIY something much better than the DP manufacturers are offering us, and for less.


Would you ever want to turn it up beyond real piano volume levels? If no, then you can use higher fidelity stereo type drivers. If yes, then you may need PA type drivers, though they make some fairly high fidelity PA drivers these days.

I'd go 2 way (mid bass & tweeter) or 3 way (mid bass & midrange & tweeter) to cover everything from 100Hz or so up, and cover the 30 Hz to 100 Hz range with a mono ported subwoofer. The tweeters might be horn-type for the PA situation, soft-dome otherwise. With a sub, the woofers can be as small as 6 1/2" - a smaller woofer will help match the tweeter or mid radiation pattern at the crossover point. The sub would have to be 10" at least. You would only need a cubic foot or so per woofer, and two or three cubic feet for the sub. The mids / tweets are usually sealed, so they can sit in the woofer volume without trouble.

I'd place the speakers left and right of the player, pointing up, probably as close as I could get them to the player so the levels would be more balanced for that perspective. The sub can point down if you like, it is generally non-directional.

Have you been to Parts Express? Lots of ideas there and good prices on drivers. You might also google "econowave" for an interesting design that I'm gearing up for (have the drivers, just waiting on the JBL waveguides). I'm using a smaller Eminence woofer than most are though (6 1/2").

I absolutely agree with you. But I still think portability and affordability are why most of us choose digital pianos. Certainly not the only reasons, and as you noted, everyone has their own specific needs.

Maybe I should restate. If you're going to spend $5,000+ on an upright cabinet with the internals of a digital, but nothing real special under the hood, why not go for an AvantGrand or V-Piano instead? Or a high-end Kawai. They make some nice, nice cabinet DP's. If the reason is sentimental value -- well it seems to me that removing the guts of a piano will void it of its sentimental value. At least it would to me, after all, it's not the same piano anymore.

A agree.

You can simplify the system slightly. Most samplers will output multi-channels and you can do the "crossover" in software. So a six channel audio interface can drive six speaker drivers through six amps. It's usually a point and click thing to set up an X Db per octave filter on a channel

Also I see not reason to but the keybed and speaker box in the same cabinet unless you are trying to simulate the look of an acoustic piano. Better I think to have interchangeable speaker/amp systems.

I've done some experiments already. There is so much room for improvement that almost any idea is in the right direction. I found that playing the DP through some audio parts salvaged from Hammond organs does not sound bad.

One thing for sure, musical insrument speakers are NOT hifi stereo speakers. Very different design goals.

I found some 15" drivers I like that can work "open baffle" that is without an enclosure. I think I prefer the sound over box speakers. It give s "this instrument is in your room" sound

Of course I could build myself a custom DP for under $10K but I would not want to sell them for less then that.

Someone really ought to come up with a retrofit kit of some sort. Take out the soundboard, strings, and cast iron frame and replace it with tasteful panels and speakers. Target really short grand pianos.

If the keys and hammers were left intact, you could use piezo transducers in place of the strings and have a the most realistic DP piano action in the world.

Nice idea. Wouldn't this approach enable you to account for some room acoustic effects as well?


For me, I'd like a nice closed package that I could just plunk down in my room and start playing. I'm afraid that if I get into stand-alone speakers, I'd have to face all the problems the home-theatre people worry about. Also, I do like sitting at my grand piano. It's not at all the same feeling when I'm using my MP8ii.

Is there no technical advantage in having the speakers interact with the wood-work and lid. I thought the general consensus was that this was the major advantage of the Avant Grand, along with the acoustic keyboard.


I'd buy it, even with the markup. I'd buy the Avant Grand but it isn't flexible enough. They should have made it so that it could be upgraded to the virtual piano of the day. It seems to me they missed the whole point of the inherent flexibility of digitization.


Dewster, this is exactly the point. If you ran everything through a computer, you'd be able to have the "latest and greatest" as the sampling/modeling technologies evolved, and you could design the sound using the ideas ChrisA just described.

I don't know how many of you have tried to buy an acoustic piano but the process is insane. You have to go to multiple stores, trying multiple instruments in acoustically challenged environments, and none of the pianos will sound the same when it's in your music space.

We should have the old Tweeter-like" stores where you can select from a variety of cabinets, keyboards and speaker sets, all completely programmable, with a technical support crew that could put it all together and provide updates as better virtual pianos came available. It could have an acoustically appropriate listening room where all the mix-and-match software and hardware options could be easily configured and evaluated.

ChrisA and Dewster, let me know when you open your first store.

Bob

I think we are on the same track about speakers. My idea was that the keyboard and speakers system by physically adjacent and look like one unit. But it would be easy to disassemble. maybe the two parts are only held together by gravity, maybe latches (such as used on the lib of a shippng case) or maybe machine screws. The idea was a modular package.

NO. piano speakers are not at all like home theatre speakers and I don't think you need to worry about the room. A DP should sound like a piano that is in your room. But yes you could allow some adjustment for people who whiched that had better rooms. HT and Stereo speakes attemp to create the illusion of sound sources located in the sppace between the speakers. Musical instrument speakers (for DP, guitars or whatever) are themselves the source of the sound. Very different.

I was thinking about a "measurement mic" So home theatre amps have this. You play a test pattern and the mic records it. the computer figures out how to remove the "error". In theory the sound is made perfect. but the problem is the perfection exists only for one geometric point in the whole room.

I hope I live long enough to actually build something. If I valued my time at $50/hr I'd have to charge $100K

I think the problem is that you'd only want to chop up a very old grand piano. No one would do that to a new $40,000 piano. or even a new $12,000 piano. Better to order it from the factory as an in-complete unit. But still you'd pay a lot. I bet 3/4 of the cost of a full new piano.


The problem with converting the old "free" craigslist piano is the action will be shot. Cheap used acoustic pianos have worse key actions than mid to high end digtal pianos.

optical sensors might work too. In fact you can't just use Pizos because you'd need to know when the key is raised.

Since I play the piano for my own pleasure, that geometric point would be me, and that would be perfect. Great idea! How would you do this without the surround-sound set of speakers?


If I put a price on the time I spend playing the piano which I do just for the fun of it and the time I spend thinking about replacing my piano, I'd be in debt for the rest of my life. If I could assemble my ideal DP for $5-10K in parts and be assured it would work, it would be, as they say,"priceless".


Don't they do that on rebuilds all the time, and the cabinet work is not where all the time and money goes.


But on a rebuild my technician buys a fully formed brand new acoustic keyboard that just slides into place. So you pick the one you like and that's that.


This is a solved problem. For $1600. you can buy a PianoScan system that has optical sensors that are installed at the bottom of the key-bed to read the MIDI information and send it to the PC via USB. A stop-rail is used to simulate the keys hitting the strings. I'd guess the Avant Grand uses a similar optical reader and stop-rail system.

I know I can hire a technician to get an old piano, refinish the cabinetry, install a new acoustic keyboard, stop-rail and optical MIDI strip reader. Feeding this into my computer, rather than using the PNOScan preset, gives me access to the software piano of the day. But then the audio-out has to go somewhere, and this is where I continue to get hung up. I don't have the experience or confidence to tackle the speaker design problem. That's what Yamaha has accomplished with their AG but it's not worth $15K to me to get it. Perhaps the options you and Dewster have provided here would do the trick. I wonder what the Englishmen do about the speakers in their A-to-D conversion?

FYI, Yamaha digitals with iAFC have a mic that's used when calibrating the iAFC system.

I've been looking to do this for a long time, I live in a townhome now and the only rooms I can put a piano in have shared walls and I'm not looking to be a noisy neighbord. I found a conversion kit on ebay awhile back. I'm a member of sounds online forums and one of their users turned me on to it, it basically attaches in place of the strings and has sensors that get hit rather than optical. The big plus is it's only going to run me $799, however it's all just midi so I'd have to hook it up to my computer or use my current keyboards sound bank (which isn't too bad since it's an external midi box and can be detached)

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=150413317515 is the auction he sent me. Though it's the best price one I've seen yet, I can't help but wonder why there aren't more of these kits/sensors/etc for under $1000? I don't have that kind of money to spend. Anybody know of any others I should be looking at?

Thanks!

-E