Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Yamaha CP50 vs. Privia PX3

You can do that with MP8ii, Brooks. Have to buy the foot controller separately, it doesn't ship with the unit. I think you can map that function to the wheel controller also.

So now I have to try it out--- it's a great idea.

The MP5 does look like a really nice piece. I wish it weren't 45 pounds! But I agree, based on what the OP is looking for, it certainly seems worth looking into. And the weight won't seems like so much to someone who is considering Yamahas anyway.

EDIT: It looks like the MP5 is being phased out?

I think you just eliminated the PX-3 from contention. Not only can't you control any volumes with a foot pedal (there's no input for an expression pedal), there isn't a way to do it from the front panel either. There are no programmable knobs (just two programmable buttons). The volume knob controls everything together. You can create presets with certain balances among the sounds, but you can't fade layers in and out on the fly.

anotherscott/Kawai MP5 - all the signs are that an updated model is on the way - probably MP5ii or MP6. Which may indicate 'buy a new model' or may be a chance to gat a bargain on an old model.

Another hymn to the wonder of the MP series - you can call up any of 64 custom programmed 4-zone voice/split/layer setups directly from hardware buttons (with multiple additional banks of 64 setups selectable via menus). Oh I do like it... but maybe you'd guessed that...

Jeff, are you saying I could control the layer volume with an expression pedal? I would guess that if you do have 4 zones then one of the left zones could be on it's own MIDI channel and be controlled via expression pedal.

Scott, The way to get around that is too have 2 or 3 of the same performances with different layer (strings) level. Then just change patch and you have more volume (or less) on the strings. It's a work around.

I picked up my new CP50 today and took it directly to the gig without even taking it out of the box. Bad move.
I thought I could just bring up the main piano sound and go. Well listening in GC with headphones is not the same as a crowed dim lit club on Friday night. I must admit that I can see the display fine in total darkness even with my bad eyes I can read it without a problem. The lighted buttons are great. Now if I only knew what the button did it would be great. Hey Yamaha, how about just put text on every button and then I would know what the button does and I could read it.

The sound of the piano in mono was really phasey and awkward and the keyboard felt completely different from what I though I liked in GC. The keys felt much harder to play and there seemed to be less travel. I knew I would have to dig in more on the CP50 keyboard but it felt too heavy to me and did not respond fast enough. Now I'm leaning back to the CP5 keyboard.

I am back home from the gig now and have the CP50 set up in my studio plugged into a Mackie speaker. I need to get more familiar with the instrument before I can make a fair judgement. I never owned a Motif but if these are Motif sound they are amazing. The CP50 and CP5 seem to be so much more bang for the buck than the CP1 because you get all these very usable sounds to layer and split. I don't know enough about how the MIDI implementation works yet but I imagine you can sequence a good amount of parts also. Now that I can play it though my speakers at home I see why everyone loves the Rhodes and Whirly sounds. The headphones just didn't do them justice. I'm only listening through a Mackie 450 but they sound great! The Hammond sounds and string sounds all sound wonderful. I love the Yamaha sounds. They have a warm richness, fullness and body.

By the way I have to put in a plug for Musiciansbuy.com. I got an Incredible deal on the CP50 from them.
I checked all the major stores and they beat everyone's deal by miles. Also they are great people to buy from. I don't work for them, I just wanted to pass on my good experience.

I talked with the Yamaha tech today in more detail about the MIDI on the CP5/50. What he tells me is that although there are drum kits onboard there is no chart telling what the MIDI program numbers are or what sounds are in what kit. The CP5/50 only reads MIDI "zero" files and will only play 4 parts. This is a bit confusing and Yamaha does not mention anything in the manual about how to address MIDI or drums.
There are drum patterns that can be PART 1 on a performance parch and tempo and beats can be stored.
I'm still trying to get more information on all this because my goal was to have MIDI drum songs and load them for live performance. That might be better accomplished as WAV files.

The CP5/50 are longer than most 88 not keyboards because of the extra cheek blocks. My CP50 would not fit into either of the 88 not cases.

I'm still thinking about the CP5 because now I think I prefer the faster response and lighter feel. Also with the CP50 I am loosing a lot of Hammond, String, bass (only one fingered bass) and other sounds that I would like to have.
The extra weight and size is not something I look forward to. For me the CP50 is more weight than I'm use to lugging around. I'm coming from a Privia PX300. BTW, my PX300 still has something going for it. Even next to the CP50 it holds it's own. Again it's weakness is short samples and not enough velocity samples and of course 32 not polyphony.

Once again it's confirmed; you cannot split and layer at the same time on the CP50. You can however do it on the CP5.

The bottom line to all this is you can't tell anything in the store. The only way to tell if you like an instrument is to get it to the gig and work with it for a few days.

Interesting updates, thanks for sharing.

Cheers,
James
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Literally everyone screams and hollers about keyboard length, and Yamaha goes out of their way to make them longer. Who cares about authentically scaled cheek blocks? DPs are right at a critical size already, add one or two inches for whatever bogus reason and suddenly the DP doesn't fit in cases or in your backseat, which is a huge, huge deal.


Before I sold it, I took my P120 apart to see what was inside. The key assembly was mounted on a huge slab of very thick MDF, easily accounting for at least 50% the weight. I understand how you want something dimensionally stable as a basis for your keys, but MDF? Why not concrete reinforced with rebar? How about depleted uranium?

What would you suggest as an alternative?
Rigid and inexpensive - MDF does the job, surely?

Cheers,
James
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I'm not a physical designer, but aluminum comes to mind. But that would be $1 more or something so we can't have that. No, better to have people schlepping 20 lbs of MDF around to gigs - the adversity makes them tougher & builds character.

Is aluminium rigid enough though? I know it's strong, however a would a long, thin base not bend or twist easily?

I'll have to ask one of the R&D guys if a lighter alternative to MDF could be used without increasing production costs significantly.

Cheers,
James
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That aircraft honeycomb stuff is amazingly rigid and light but probably too expensive. While you're over in R&D ask those guys what they have against $1 more of Flash memory.

I expect they will tell me that $1 quickly becomes $5, then $25 with each link in the chain.

I agree though - a little bit of extra memory, or slightly more expensive materials here and there could make a real difference. But trust me, the engineering chaps at Yamaha, Roland, Kawai, etc. all know their stuff, and are obviously trying to raise the bar with each generation of product. If dramatic improvements in quality were really as straight-forward as you suggest, do you not think these guys would have tried already?

Cheers,
James
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That's a pretty major compromise based on your wanting to have strings you can "bring in and swell as the song builds" as you put it, but it's better than nothing. You're not going to get the swell effect, but at least you can have some variation. There's also the issue that you have to take a hand off the keyboard to make the change. But it's Casio's first go at a Privia that has controller-style features, it's not bad, and hopefully will be a foundation for some better implementations in the future.


I am amazed that companies keep messing this up. Many FOH systems--probably most of them--are mono (and should be, IMO). There is no great mystery to creating stereo sounds that collapse cleanly to mono, the record industry figured out how to do it over 50 years ago.


In my experience, Yamaha has the worst manuals in the industry. Which is a double whammy because many of their user interfaces are also among the worst, so the need for a clear manual is even greater. Yamaha stuff is well built and sounds great, but can be really irritating to use. Even once you figure out how to do something, if you don't do it day in and day out, when you need to do the same kind of thing months later, you'll probably find yourself frustratingly back at square one.

If I were a designer, I would struggle mightily to keep significant amounts of high mass materials such as MDF out of any product I made with the word "portable" in the description, particularly if my customers were constantly whining about weight.

When I was a kid they made these black & white TVs that weighed 80 lbs or something, and by slapping a handle on the top they figured they could advertise them as "portable" - something of a running joke for what seemed years.

No offense, but DP manufacturers don't strike me as all that crackerjack. The market is modest and heavily entrenched, and the players are rather small potatoes - competition apparently isn't fierce enough to keep the designers awake at night worrying what the other guy might be ready to spring on them. At NAMM they're probably one big happy family.

"Jeff, are you saying I could control the layer volume with an expression pedal? I would guess that if you do have 4 zones then one of the left zones could be on it's own MIDI channel and be controlled via expression pedal. "

Yes. I was hacking my way through the somewhat arcane language of the manual, trying to figure out how to set it up so I could give a tried-and-tested answer. But--- it turned out to be very easy. The very first Setup, 'Piano and Strings' (the exact voices you asked about) turned out to be set up that way out of the box. The Expression pedal controls the volume of the Strings voice (within the limits set by the front panel slider for that zone), while the Piano voice is unaffected.

Hot damn! So, never mind the hack. If you want to read the manual, you can download it from the Kawai website.

I know the Yamaha P155 that I had a while back had an MDF base and it appears that my CP50 also has MDF base. I'm guessing the CP5 is the same. I'm guessing from James's comments that Kawia is also built on MDF. MDF is cheap and very solid as long as it does not get wet. If it gets wet it swells and falls apart. I don't think there is a cheaper alternative for a solid base but personally I would easily spend an extra $50 to have it 10-20 lbs lighter and I'm sure the difference in cost for a lighter wood (plywood, spruce, poplar, basswood), composite or aluminum board the same size would not be $50.

There is no need for the cheek block on the right side and there is plenty of room to have put the mod wheel on the top panel. Eliminating the cheek blocks would reduce the size of the piano almost 6".

I am working with the CP50 today to learn more about it and see what limitations I run up against for my live gig. So far the biggest is not having enough PARTS to do split bass right hand and layer piano/strings (organ, pad, etc) with left. The second would be the loss of the CP5 voices that are important to me.
Third would be so far, although the Yamaha literature list 14 drum kits on there catalog specs for the CP5/50 there is nothing in the manual that tells you how to access the drum kits or drum sounds. I also can find any drum sounds listed in the voice chart.

I am heading to my local computer store to buy a thumb drive and try out the MIDI and WAV playback today. I'll let you know what I find out later.

The pluses are I like the display and I'm getting use to the interface but again it's not very intuitive. The Grand Piano and the Electric Pianos are great. I'm also very pleased with the other sounds which are rich and detailed. I just wish I had all the same sounds as the CP5. I ending paying a little more than a Yamaha P155 and the CP50 is so much more.

This is an interesting point, dewster. If you think about what we are asking the keyboard base to do, it has to absorb the energy from your hands and dissipate it with as little flexing and resonating as possible. On top of that, we don't want to place the keyboard on a solid base, rather we want to suspend it in the air on two bars! Given those requirements, it may be that MDF is a miracle material which on top of everything else is also cheap.

Although we care about minimizing weight, I have a feeling that minimizing mass does bad things to the feel of the keyboard.

OK, we have hijacked this thread. Sorry.

Weight is a huge selling point in a portable keyboard, I would pay more for less here too.


Size is a huge selling point in a portable keyboard - for the life of me I don't know why every manufacturer seems so intent on making their keyboards longer. It's like they're thumbing their noses at us, or they are completely oblivious.


Brooks, could I persuade you to do a DPBSD test on the CP50? I'm really curious to see if the sample set for the CFIII piano is identical to the CP1.


Even given the counterintuitive UI of the CP50, I'm pretty sure I would pick it over the P155 too.

If you are talking something flimsy like an X-stand, I agree. But a lightweight keyboard on a good sturdy stand should feel fine.

The problem is also that $50 in additional material cost ends up being a lot more than a $50 increase in retail price, as it gets marked up at every step in the chain. OTOH, there would also be some freight savings from being able to ship finished units that were that much lighter.

And the missing piece of the equation... how many more units might they sell if it weighed that much less? I wince when a board tops 30 lbs, and will absolutely refuse to consider anything that hits 40.

The industry probably looks at Privia and says "they sell because they're cheap." I'm sure there's a good deal of that, but I bet a whole lot of them are sold because they're *light*. It's also a big part of Nord's appeal.

I was mentioning how much I like the feature set of the Kawai MP5, though I've never played one. Street price on it looks to be $1199, but it's 45 lb. If I liked the sounds and the action on it, I'd pay more for it if it were lighter, but at 45 lb, I won't consider it. It would be interesting if they had an $1199 standard version, and a $1299 or even $1399 version that was identical except weighed under 30 lb. At a $100 premium, I bet it would be the bigger seller. It would be a tougher sell at a $200 premium, but I think there would still be a market.

EDIT: Okay, maybe not the *bigger* seller, their market is more than gigging musicians, but for that significant segment, I think most of us would pay the difference.