Acoustic Piano vs. Digital Piano

Chickering console piano located in Liberty, MO

Kimball grand piano located in Smithville, MO

The soundboard resonance and the effect of the damper pedal still hasn't been duplicated on digital pianos. The good news is you don't have to tune a digital piano but the bad news it doesn't sound as good as a freshly tuned acoustic piano. You don't have to call a piano tuner or the piano movers every time you want to move it to a different room but why the heck would you want to move it anyways.

Piano teachers would rather the student have an acoustic piano at home and they will push the student towards getting rid of the toy to having the real thing. Most piano students will lose interest very quickly on a digital piano from lack of sound quality. Even with an elaborate sound system the interest goes away very quickly. My advice would be to buy an acoustic piano and call a certified piano tuner twice a year to service it. You will have much more enjoyment playing the real thing and piano tuning cost is not that much.

There's been a lot of advancement over the last ten years in multi sampled pianos. The sampled pianos have been sampled at different velocities from soft to loud sometimes up to ten velocities. This is impressive to sample a very expensive $125,000 concert grand at 10 velocities down stroke, 10 release velocities and sample the soundboard resonance of the damper pedal. It looks good on paper and sounds nice on a recording but when you sit down to play the digital piano there is a lot missing.

Physical modelling is the next generation of digital pianos and the advantage is it will use less computer resources. The hard drive and ram space is almost none but will require a faster CPU. Up to 127 different velocities per note can be used and the same with release velocities and soundboard resonance. It doesn't have as good of an attack as the sampled piano and tends to sound boring to play. I can't stand to play a physical modeled piano for more than 15 minutes.

The problem with playing a computer generated piano is the delay or latency from the time you play the note to when the note actually starts. With a good sound card and a fast computer you can get this down to 4 to 8 milliseconds but it still drives you crazy. I want the sound to start immediately for my creativity to set in. Buying a Yamaha acoustic piano and calling a piano tuner twice a year will give you all the musical enjoyment you will ever need.

Acoustic Piano Service for Kansas City MO
(816) 587-9970

Piano Technicians Guild