Digital Pianos, Keyboards and Acoustic Pianos
I’ve talked about our digital piano before. It’s a Kawai and I absolutely love it. I love the sound it gives and the feel is better than so many acoustic uprights I’ve played. When I have students start out at piano one of the questions I get very often is about what they should have to practice on. I’ve had students that have had everything from a cheap $30-$40 keyboard up to expensive grand pianos. Here’s what to look for if you’re considering buying an instrument for someone you know to have lessons on.
Keyboards typically have shorter keyboards than a piano does. The piano has 88 keys and many keyboards will have between 40-60 keys. Now, for the first few years of practice that may not make much difference, but it is extremely important that the keys are full sized. If a student practices on small keys at home and comes to the studio to play on a real piano they will feel like they’ve been playing on a toy. (Schroeder’s piano?)
More expensive keyboards have full size keys and actual weighting of the keys. This means that the keys feel more substantial than just a cheap plastic lever. They actually take a bit of effort to push down and while they may not feel like the keys of an acoustic piano, they are closer.
Another feature to look for is this, does the sound get louder if I press down the keys harder. This is the way an acoustic piano behaves. The cheapest keyboards typically don’t do this.
Moving up from the keyboards we look at the digital pianos. Typically these only have a few sounds, where the keyboards focus on hundreds of sounds. Usually with digital pianos you have samples or digital recordings of a real acoustic instrument. I know with ours, the sound was sampled from a Kawai grand. Digital pianos also typically have 88 weighted, full sized keys. This is really the range that would be an excellent beginners instrument. I’ve seen very good digital pianos in the $500 - $700 range. The price goes up from there. Among the advantages of the digital piano: they never need tuning, headphones are usually an option, the sound usually well surpasses similarly priced upright pianos. (They use the sound of a grand piano usually.)
Acoustic pianos can usually be had from a couple hundred dollars (usually used.) up into the thousands. It’s important to test out used instruments, perhaps even get a piano tuner to look it over for you. Acoustic pianos need to be tuned after moving and to help it stay in it’s best shape you will need to make sure it’s placed against an interior wall to protect it from temperature fluctuations. Some acoustics hold a tune quite while, others may need more frequent tuning.
The sound of the upright pianos is usually not quite as clear in the lower octaves as the grand pianos. With grand pianos it’s possible to extend the strings out for their full length and clearer bass tones are achieved that way.
One other thing of note about acoustic pianos is that the touch or feel of the keys can vary greatly from one to another. This is something that the pianist needs to get used to. Unfortunately we don’t get to carry our instrument around in a gig bag like the guitarists do.
I’ve had students work with a keyboard for many years and it certainly doesn’t prevent them from learning, but it does make it more difficult to practice adjusting the loudness and softness of the music, using the pedal and getting used to the weight of the keys (building up strength in the fingers, hands/arms.) It seems as though the students that I’ve had that have progressed the furthest, quickest have all had either a digital piano or acoustic piano to practice on. I suspect if you start on a keyboard and then move up to a digital or acoustic piano you’ll feel like you’ve been missing out by playing with a toy for that time.
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