I embrace technology Gyro, and I have two keyboards, both of which I HATE TO PLAY because it is easy enough to compare and hear their deficiencies.

Why do you argue this point? Roland V-Piano? Nice but sounds artificial. Sure it is better than my current keyboards but frankly it has a machine made sound. Maybe you don't play dense chords like I do. I have to drown my digital in reverb because it can't duplicate the resonance of the real deal.

Digitals have their purpose: portability and quiet practice. However don't assume we can't hear their deficiencies. I hear it daily. (Hours a day since I'm forced to practice more on the DP).

I get this question all the time from students. I always say, you can start with a digital but at some point you will need the real thing! Also, here in Austin some music stores will rent out pianos, its cheaper than you think and less committal :-)

I have a Yamaha C2M grand which shares our one large ground floor room with the dining area and cosy lounge-TV-corner, etc. I also have a Yamaha P120 didgital in a nice basement room for silent - often repetitive! - practicing, especialy in the evenings or later. For me this is the ideal set-up. I can practice away to my heart's content on the digital and then impress my wife, the dogs and myself when I transfer the end product to the grand!

I agree LittleBlueEngine, but you know Gyro just copies and pastes this post any time a similar subject comes up.

OT, I have a digital piano and an acoustic in my studio. Some of the younger kids like to alternate which instrument they play on each week. The digital is great for taking to nursing homes when we do recitals there so I don't have to worry about the condition of the nursing home's piano. I also use it for a more authentic tuning (A=432 instead of A=440) for my voice students. For someone who might need an instrument to practice at late hours without having to worry about disturbing family members, having both is a great idea.

However, the sound of an acoustic piano is just so much better. It carries much further than the digital, which just seems to fall dead and you have to turn it way up to have it be heard when accompanying a singer. Even with having mine hooked up so a stereo for better sound, digital piano sound is directional from the speakers rather than going out everywhere from an acoustic. For this reason, acoustic is a much better sound in general.

I remember that as a child I had a neighbour who played the violin and the other neighbours laughed at her for playing the same piece over and over again and they had even bought ear plugs... So, yes, repetitiveness can drive those around you crazy, and quite often non-musicians don't understand at all what practice is anyway...
That's when DPs come in really handy!

How do you define/recognize the point, your student needs an acoustic piano?

Ok, let's turn the point of view of the question. I think my question was written in a way so you could read between the words, that I am bias and really would like to buy/rent an acoustic.

If I change the bias and say: I am an adult beginner with about 1 1/2 years of lessons. Very enthusiastic. Enthusiasm increasing. Like to listen to piano music a lot. Want to learn (and in fact am constantly learning) playing and music theory a lot. I really like my digital piano a lot. Is there anyone who would advise me to buy/rent an acoustic soon? And if yes, because of what reason?

My long term goal is not to just play a long a little on my digital, so so. But to achieve a level, let's say a 20 year old student has after 10 years of lessons.

Mawima, I had nine yrs. of classical lessons as a child. Back then I played only acoustic pianos, an upright at home and uprights and grands in the teachers' studios and at recitals, as there were no digitals available at that time. I quit playing in high school, and when I restarted as an adult 20 yrs. later, the first piano I bought was an expensive acoustic upright, for ~$6000 (a similar model today would be in the ~$20,000 price range), a huge sum for an upright in the early 1980's. The reasoning was that I wanted to make a better showing the second time around on the piano, and I thought that having the best piano available would help in this. I quickly discovered that I was dead wrong; the expensive piano didn't help my playing on iota. In total disgust I put that upright into storage where it has remained to this day. Since that experience, I've been extremely wary of spending a lot of money on a piano.

I later moved into an apt. building where an acoustic piano would have been too loud. I looked around for alternatives. I looked for an old silent keyboard but couldn't find one--they've all been thrown away over the yrs. by people who thought they were broken pianos. I tried playing in the air with my fingers. I bought a life-sized cardboard chart with a keyboard printed on it. This was in the late 1980's and digitals were already available, but with my long classical background I never once considered them, as they were "not real pianos."

Then one day I happened to wander into a piano store, not really looking for anything specific, and I was absolutely stunned by the digital pianos they had available. This was in 1989, and even way back then there were digitals with fully weighted keys that played just like an acoustic piano. It was like a revelation: here was the answer to all my problems at the keyboard. I had immediately recognized the potential of digital pianos; I was so impressed that I bought one on the spot, a Korg C-800 digital console with unweighted keys, for $1700. I refused to pay more for one with weighted keys because of my reluctance to spend a lot on a piano.

Since 1989 I've been playing only digitals and I'm completely sold on them. I've owned four, that Korg C-800, a Casio AP-24 bought online in 2005 for $700, a Korg SP-250 bought online in 2006 for $900, and my current one, a Williams Overture, bought online in 2009 for $600. With those 4 digitals I been able to advance my playing to where I can now play the Chopin op. 14 at about 3/4 speed, with errors, an unbelievable achievement for a below-average player like myself.

You can see from the above that I've gone from an expensive acoustic piano to four digitals, and the trend has been to cheaper and cheaper pianos, even as my playing has gotten more advanced: ~$20,000(~$6000)-->$1700-->$700-->$900-->$600. I still have that expensive upright in storage, but I don't even consider taking it out of storage because I consider my current digital, the $600 Williams, to be a more practical, and better, instrument overall. The Williams is satisfactory for playing anything, from jazz improv to the most difficult concertos.

Gyro,

How odd that you bought an expensive piano only to put it into storage instead of selling it when you became disillusioned.

Dan

Yes.

I think you should keep the digial (rather than try to sell it) for late night/silent practice and emergencies...

But, yes, get the acoustic.

I took lessons for a couple years using the digital... bought an acoustic upright about a year ago, and within a week or two my teacher told me he could absolutely hear the difference in my playing. That quickly!

With the acoustic, you'll have (in my opinion) more control and more types of sounds to play with. How you play matters more - you can get dynamics and more variation/shading.

Since you get more/different reactions, you start to react to that and play differently (better!) even if you don't realize you're doing that at first.

Now that I've had the acoustic for just over a year, my teacher randomly mentioned it to me the other night again, randomly during the lesson... he said with the digital I played "mousy" (quiet, hesitant when I used the acoustic at lessons). Now I actually make alot more noise (in a good way, of course).

I don't usually notice it, until I go back to the digital... it's a fairly good one, but it feels very plastic-y after being on the acoustic one, and limited (and I'm not that good).

I still like having it - it's fine for late night practice trying to get fingering down, or playing with (using the built in metronome, recording, using the different voices). But now I do almost all my real practicing on the acoustic.

Hope that helps some.

(Oh yeah, and with the acoustic you can get some really cool harmonic sounds coming out of the piano. At least on my piano... holding down notes on one hand for a long time, and playing something with the other hand... you expect the held notes to die out... but sometimes you get weird, very cool sounding, vibrations from that - lots of fun to "discover" and not at all available on the digital!)

I would also say that given sufficient money and space, it appears perfectly reasonable to have both.

The reason for this is that, although the digital have many advantages, at the current level of technology, the acoustic gives a much better experience from the PLAYERs perspective.

Having said that, I have to agree somewhat with Gyro.

In the following I use the term synthesizer as a collective term for all sort of electronic keyboards (including digital pianos), since they share more technology than they differ.

From a RECORDING and popular music CONCERT perspective, I'am afraid, we are already seeing that digital synthesizers are taking over in a big fashion. With todays synthesizers the majority of people can't distinguish music from acoustic versus synthesizers when the primary source of sound is from loudspeakers.

See "Broadway sings blues over synthesizer invasion":
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hgWRFjXMEeZ6C8wOghjExHJ4o-Kg

Synthesizers have so many unique advantages, and the sound will continue to improve, and therefore their use will continue to increase. They will never become real pianos, but from a sound perspective the difference will diminish to become zero at some point, also from a PLAYERs perspective. There is every reason to believe this.

Unfortunately this will also mean that acoustic pianos will sell less, and the price will increase. I do not think they will go away, but they will become rare. And the few there are will also undergo technological changes, as will everything else.

And this is not a bad thing.

If you find this scenery frightening, then just remember that Bach himself was at the very forefront of technology at his time, and that if he had lived today he would probably have embraced electronic synthesizers.

I would like to liven up the thread and give you an update. In the meantime we bought a very cheap used upright and it was a good decision.

We kept our digital, but it is very rarely used any more. This cheap upright brings so much more joy in playing than our digital piano. In comparison to other expensive uprights it might be bad, but it really lives. The sound has more shades, the dynamic is a lot better. Sitting in front of over 200 strings is so much more than sitting in front of two speakers.

The keyboard feels a lot better, too. My finger power has increased a lot. I realize that, when I move back to the digital.

We really wonder, why we ever bought a digital. We did not know, playing an acoustic piano is so much more of an experince. And we always thought, acoustic pianos are too expensive. But in fact our acoustic was about a quarter of the price of our digital.

It's an extremely common arrangement, as you mentioned.

Many say a digital is good for night-time practise, and "learning the notes."

Practicing on the digital will not help you with dynamics and tone control when you do switch to an acoustic. They are 2 different instruments entirely.

PS-Even more unreasonable is that I have 2 acoustics in the living room...about 2 years apart in age.

Maybe that's unreasonable, but it sounds great!

Yes, many of us have both and use them for different purposes.

Besides the usual reasons you've read about here, there are 2 main reasons I bought a digital.

1. It's portable and I can take it with me on vacation

2. I sometimes play for various function at various locations i.e.weddings, funerals, background music, library programs etc. Many of these places have acoustic pianos which are far worse that the cheapest digital.

Contrary to what some people seem to think, there are MANY acoustic pianos that are in such terrible condition that they are nearly unplayable and are embarassing and miserable to play on. I take my digital to those locations. It is simply not true that any acoustic is better than any digital. The people who say that are people who never have to encounter these monstrosities.