Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Is it possible to DP at all?

Look at this beauty! This level of performer and instrument of unity for the DP will be unreachable for a long time...
http://youtu.be/qLTManObB40

Nice playing, however, what's wrong with the piano?

Sounds more like a honky tonk than a grand...

I'll keep my V-Piano that's for sure!

This Gershwin, and the sound of the piano a little bit frustrated adding more emotion and color to the sound!

Goodness, what a performance!

As to the sound of the piano, I wonder whether it was late in the festival, and they hadn't retained the services of the tuner...

...or, it was a deliberate attempt to create a more "authentic" jazz era sound.

Just notice how it responds to the lightning finger work, though. That would be an incredibly tough test for any DP.

Who knows? We can't hear the piano. We only have a digital recording that is only "fair to acceptable" quality. Could be microphone placement or just using the wrong mic. Any number of minor technical problems. We simply don't know what the live audience heard.

But about the quality of digital v. acoustic. It is unfair to compare. All of the consumer type DPs are built to a low price point. You should ask Steinway to build an $1,800 acoustic grand piano and compare that to an $1,800 DP.

Yes!!!!!

How do you go about adding emotion and color to the sound? When I listen to pianos I only hear dynamic changes.

Try desynchronizations (very effective in Gershwin's Prelude No.2), different voicings (in the classical sense) and agogic hesitations....

Old-school pianists like Vladimir de Pachmann were fond of these tricks .

Some pianos whether digital or strings-and-hammers change in tonal color depending on how hard you strike. Those are the ones I like. I bought a DP that does that. The harder your hit, the brighter, clangier, more overtone-laden the sound becomes. As you quiet down, it becomes more mellow, less firey, less ringy, like a harp, almost.


Some others, on the other hand don't change color or tone, no matter how you strike. Those make me yawn. Dead, dead dead. Same sound all the time, just louder or softer. I passed on those that don't have fire and color. There are digital pianos this boring, and many hammers-and-strings pianos this boring, too.

Yuri, not all DPs are boring messes. Just like not all acoustic hammers-and-strings pianos are colorful fiery passionate beasts. There's boring ones in both camps. My experience? There's more boring ones than fiery ones, and the fiery ones seem to be extremely polarizing -- people either love 'em or hate 'em, whereas the boring ones seem, for some unfathomable reason, to have wide mass appeal.
I don't get it.