I want to purchase a Christmas gift for a Music Teacher, and need some advice please. We're both absolute newbies, and though he can play piano well, he has no experience in electric pianos / synths, etc.

Our needs are simple - a full sized keyboard with realistic keys that duplicates a piano exceptionally well. It should be "portable" (i.e. not a full digital piano, something we can move easily back and forth). Our only other interest is MIDI - we want to use Finale 2003 and connect the keyboard via midi so we can have Finale record on the fly.

Two of the top contenders are the Yamaha P80 and the Roland Rs-9.

Can anyone comments on the pros / cons of each? If you own one of these babies can you comment?

We do NOT need a lot of bells and whistles, just great sounding piano, please.

Thanks for all your comments!

A couple of comments, not so much about the piano as the Finale program.

First, about the Finale financing. You probably know this already, but I'll mention it anyway, General public price is around $500. Finale has academic pricing of closer to $300 for those in Church musical programs, teachers in music educational programs, and students in University Music programs. If someone involved here fits one of those categories, check this possibility out.

Secondly, recording "on the fly" with Finale IS possible, but if a good clean piece of sheet music is what your hoping to have as a result, it won't be without some additional work after the recording session. Finale has 3 methods of entering notes on the sheet music: "Simply Entry" (a click&drag operation done entirely on the monitor), "SpeedyEntry" (MidiKeyboard Pitch entry, QwertyKeyboard Rhythm input), and "HyperScribe" (You play on MidiKeyboard, Finale records everything on the sheet music for you)

HyperScribe sounds like a great idea, (and IS, in fact) but unless you have VERY disciplined rhythm and a VERY steady beat, you will absolutely have to go back and correct a lot of rhythm mistakes to make it readable. It CAN be done, its just not automatically correct. Once you're in there trying to clean up the transcription, you'll need to be familiar with the program's editing and rebar commands, so there will definitely be some learning to be done. Hopefully, there is a person close by with some experience with the program because trying to learn it from scratch with just the tutorials, the videos, and the manual is a bit more than a weekend project and can be pretty frustrating. Call them Finale Technical Assistance guys. They're pretty good and may save you some of that forehead slapping.

As far as the MidiKeyboards, I don't have much information for you. I have a 1999 Technics that I like, and it feeds nicely into the Finale program, which I also like.

Good luck
Bob

Thanks for the heads up. We figured it would involve a learning curve, as the rest of Finale has proven to be pretty tough to get a handle on. We have figured out the basics though and compositions are coming along. I wish there was an up to date instruction guide for mastering Finale 2003.

Heres an earlier thread from this forum with links to websites related to Finale. Most books in print about Finale are NOT updated each year as it would be too much work. However, the BASICS that you need to get in and get around inside Finale haven't changed that much over the last 5 years. (I'm told) So the books published 2000 or so would still be useful.

Previous PianoWorld Thread with Finale Link info

Hang in there,
Bob

I use the less expensive Finale Allegro (approx $150) but both versions have a "sensitivity" control (sorry, forgot the correct name) where you may set the hyperscribe notation to round-off to a sixteenth, eight, quarter note etc thus avoiding the problem RKVS1 aptly describes.

I have little experience with the Roland Rs-9 outside of briefly playing in music store settings. Seemed like a quality instrument.

I have used the (very portable) Yamaha P-80 in my studio for 2 years and find it a terrific keyboard that met all my needs for a close simulation of piano feel/response. I have commented about this in other threads in this forum.