Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards What is the point of all the sounds?

I suppose manufactures include additional sounds so that someone like me will buy their instruments. When I finish practicing my piano pieces, I love to change up the patches and let the sound dictate the music rather than the music dictate the sound. But then, I am a patch junkie, not a piano purist. Apparently the world includes a few others like me.

Memory is super cheap these days. And these other sounds use vastly less memory than the piano sound engine. Throwing in these extra sounds is probably cheaper than the toy surprise in cracker jacks.

tom

What about all those extra buttons, which not only clutter up the console but must surely add additional cost to the manufacture and circuitry, even if the memory itself costs peanuts?

On the V-Piano, there is just one dial to access all 28 piano sounds. If they'd added organ, EP, synth, strings, harpsichord etc, to the dial, one would have to scroll through all the piano sounds (plus your own customized piano sounds, which can number up to 100 if you're so inclined to tinker) to access one of them (or alternatively, scroll through all the junk to access the piano sounds).

Most low cost digitals are sold to families with kids. Most kids like playing with the extra sounds. It is as simple as that.

My wife teaches private piano, and she uses the DP as a something of a treat for the little ones. Most of the lesson is on the AP, and at the end they often move to the DP. The student gets to pick among the various sounds while they play their piece over and over (and over). Good way to stimulate practice. (Really young students with weak fingers often have their lessons entirely on the DP due to the somewhat lighter action.)

This is another reason the RD-700NX is nice, there are gobs of sounds in there, and the UI is simple enough for children and non-technical adults to grasp the rudiments fairly intuitively.

bennevis, if that were the standard for learning to play, very few people would ever learn. I would not want a world where the playing of music is confined to child prodigies who spend hours a day focused on their instruments and have no time for sports or play or sleepovers with their friends. Much of learning to play the piano is drudgery (PLAYING is fun, learning to play not so much). If one can make learning more fun for children, why wouldn't you want that? If one can make the creation of music accessible to more people, why wouldn't one want that?

For my own playing, I find that practicing pieces with different sounds helps me learn them more solidly. Also, it's just fun sometimes. I love the sound of the piano, and love playing piano. But sometimes it can be fun to layer a pad under it, or play a piece with the vibraphone (or whatever), or improvise a bit with a bass sound in the left hand split, etc...

Point taken, but I have an awful suspicion that if I'd started out learning on such a DP as a child, I wouldn't have become a classical pianist and be able to play most of the world's great piano music that's been composed over the past few centuries.
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If I had a DP that could give me all sorts of sounds and rhythm accompaniments etc when I was learning to play, I'd have spent all my 'practice' time playing with all those possibilities, rather than building up my technique

If I had a DP that could give me all sorts of sounds and rhythm accompaniments etc when I was learning to play, I'd have spent all my 'practice' time playing with all those possibilities, rather than building up my technique and musicianship - which required thousands of hours of incessant practising, and listening critically to myself playing, for which there are no short-cuts

Maybe, who knows? You might have ended up a composer instead of playing songs of composers that have long since died.