What's wrong with digital keyboards

[richard black]

There's been plenty of discussion here over the years of the merits and drawbacks of 'digital pianos' and other variations on the theme of keyboards synthesiser, but I thought it worth while posting a few comments on why these things are not, and will never be, a substitute for a piano.

Just so that people know where I'm coming from with this, apart from being a pianist I am a recording engineer and have extensive experience of designing, building and repairing electronic and electromechanical systems including all kinds of audio gear, so I do have _some_ idea what I'm on about!

Electronic piano-substitutes have lots of genuine, valuable uses, obviously, from (near-) silent practice to providing accompaniment for other musicians at piano-less venues. I occasionally get to play opera rehearsals on a keyboard, and while it's not as much fun as a piano it's arguably no less valid than a piano since what I'm playing wasn't written, originally, for either.

But there are two pretty major limitations. One is technical. I don't care how sophisticated your sampling is, _at best_ an electronic instrument can be no better than a recording of a piano, and any recording engineer will confirm that piano is one very difficult instrument to record and play back convincingly. Audiophiles spend many thousands of $ buying loudspeakers which still don't really reproduce piano entirely convincingly.

In addition to the recording and replay, there is the user interface - the key sensors. These are just as hard to get exactly right, and there's another problem in that there is a greater delay in an electronic instrument between the key going down and the sound coming out. It's only in the region of milliseconds, but it still gets in the way of the all-important ear/fingers/brain feedback loop that we all use when we play (well, when we play properly!). Speaking of time delay, many keyboards and all MIDI-controlled synths I've come across don't even play two notes simultaneously. They are only a millisecond or two apart but in a big chord this can be pretty obvious. (To test this, take a stiff straight-edge and us it to push down 15 or 20 white keys simultaneously. On many keyboards, you'll get a rapid scale rather than a simultaneous crunch of noise.)

And of course, as regards the recording and replay bit, where do you put the microphone? The sound coming from a piano varies _a lot_ depending on where one stands, note by note. A lot of the richness of tone of a fine piano in a good concert venue comes from the way the sound bounces around and mixes from various directions at the listener's seat. No synth I've seen has any like this richness and although it could be done it would cost probably about as much as a real concert piano!

Still, all those issues can in principle be addressed and I look forward to synth makers doing so as technology progresses.

But there's still a major blind alley intrinsic to the whole process of making a 'digital piano', and that is that it is an attempt to copy a pre-existing instrument. This is actually something new: when Cristofori invented the piano he wasn't trying to make it sound like a harpsichord! The electric guitar is a new instrument using the same interface and notation as the Spanish guitar, and the Hammond organ was never intended to mimic a church organ.

The nearest analogy I can think of is the Mona Lisa. You can photograph the Mona Lisa but the photo is still a reproduction, not the real thing, and no one will pay you millions for it or hang it in a major public art gallery. You could make a very detailed laser scan of the Mona Lisa and reproduce not only the colours but even the texture, and it would be a very impressive and interesting thing but it still wouldn't be the Mona Lisa. Similarly, a piano - like any instrument - is in its own way a work of art and however impressive a sonic copy is, it's at best a work of craft, and arguably hardly even that.

The big irony, it seems to me, is that keyboard synths can be wonderful things when they are producing sounds unimaginable before the age of electronics. There are some very fine keyboard players, especially in the worlds of jazz and rock, who play on keyboards stuff that would absolutely not work on piano.

[m19834]

Thanks for your post, it is interesting to read your perspective.  Since for some reason I have decided to be somewhat passionate about this subject, I have to write in yet again on it to express my ever-so-important opinion  .  

I am certainly not an expert on mechanics of digitals or acoustics, but there is one thing that stands out to me based on what I DO know (or at least what I think I know  ), and that is the issue of an individual's "voice."  So, as I understand it, the sound of a digital is recorded from an acoustic and sampled into the digital's sound spectrum (right ?), and when a person (any person) presses a key, aside from dynamic variations, every person is going to get the same sound out of the instrument as any other person, right ?  It seems it would need to be so, if the sound is pre-recorded.  So, regarding "colors" and "shading" and all other subtleties and individual performer characteristics, any person is limited to whatever sound is already sampled in.  

And, who or what presses the keys on the acoustic that is being recorded to make the sound sample for the digital ?

Some people don't believe that there are actually tone variations in piano playing, and from certain arguments I 'get' how the reasoning would work.  At the end of the day though, when I am standing there, listening to my teacher play a passage, countless times I have heard him get sounds out of the piano that I had not been able to make or had to (attempt to) learn to make.  It seems that some people can get the instrument to 'sing' whereas others simply can't or don't.  AND, with a digital, we would not even have that choice (which would MAJORLY affect technique AND the entire musical concept of a piece).

This is similar, in my mind, to deciding that as a singer, I must sing into something like a microphone and out of the speakers (or whatever contraption) comes Cecilia Bartoli's sampled voice instead of my own (maybe for some people they would celebrate that and welcome that ... and, not to knock Cecilia, but I would like to find my own voice, thank you very much).  And, that ALL singers only have that option --more or less-- from now on.  haha ... sorry, UNIMAGINABLE !!

BYE BYE ... my ACOUSTIC piano is calling to me  

[thalbergmad]

Some people don't believe that there are actually tone variations in piano playing

Judging by some recordings I have heard, some pianists don't either.

Thal

[indianajo]

There are things an acoustic an do that a digital can't do- like the way the upper undamped octave sings with the lower notes when I am hammering out treble jazz on my Sohmer or Steinway console. Or like the way the lower strings sing with the treble notes when the dampers are held up.  There are things a digital can do that an acoustic cannot do- like bend the pitch if you lean on the aftertouch rubber pad, or reproduce ARP or Fairport Convention exotic sounds.  There are even things an acoustic piano shouldn't do. I recently heard a TV program of Scott Joplin pieces played on a 9 foot grand by a professor in Iowa.  It sounds good, but it doesn't have the "honk" of "honky tonk" which I heard on a 1900 Baldwin in a Junque shoppe, or on the low fi movie soundtrack of Willie "the Lion" Smith playing "Finger Buster" I heard on the PBS series.  Art involves using the right media to get the best effect, or the effect the artist intended, or maybe the effect the composer intended.  There is bad art, there is good art, there is the art of the available, there is traditional art, there is historic art.  I like Beethoven both on modern instruments and played on period instruments.  I like Bach on 4 harpsichords at once, also I like him on my resonant piano, I also like him on the Hammond Organ, I like him on the Harvard Pipe Organ, I also liked him on ARP synthesizer when he was "Switched On".  What I didn't like was Emerson Lake and Palmer slobbing through "Pictures at and Exhibition" on their synth- but if we all agreed about art we wouldn't have much to talk about. 

[richard black]

 K. wrote:

as I understand it, the sound of a digital is recorded from an acoustic and sampled into the digital's sound spectrum (right ?), and when a person (any person) presses a key, aside from dynamic variations, every person is going to get the same sound out of the instrument as any other person, right ?

Exactly correct. But, interestingly, the same is _largely_ true of a real piano. I've not seen any research (and I've looked!) to determine to precisely what extent that is true, but it is certainly the case that an individual's tone is far more due to the relation between the loudness of notes, both notes sounded simultaneously (in a chord) and those sounded shortly beforehand and afterwards, than it is to the 'character' of one individual note.

However, there is quite a lot of sound that comes out of a piano when it is played that does not originate directly from the string - the finger on the key, the key on the key bed, etc. Oh, and this serves to remind me of one other thing that digitals don't currently address (though again I can see in principle that it could be done) - the way the strings of a piano pick up resonance when other notes are played, especially, though not exclusively, when the damper pedal is depressed.

[gyzzzmo]

So, as I understand it, the sound of a digital is recorded from an acoustic and sampled into the digital's sound spectrum (right ?), and when a person (any person) presses a key, aside from dynamic variations, every person is going to get the same sound out of the instrument as any other person, right ?

Wich is the case on an accoustic piano too......

[indianajo]

Quote Richard Black -"the way the strings of a piano pick up resonance when other notes are played, especially, though not exclusively, when the damper pedal is depressed." A piece where the treble string resonance is delightful is George Winston's Jazzy arrangement "The Holly and the Ivy" off the Winter album.  The ringing reminds me of the wind off the powerline wires & treelimbs on a frosty cold night.  The HiFi can begin to approximate how the strings are interacting, but I doubt that digital keyboard software has this complicated a mathmatical model of the instrument.  A piece where the bass strings sing with each other is Debussy's  prelude "Le Cathedrale Engloutie". It sounds like murk stirred up in swirls off the bay floor by the dying river current.  Both pieces sound great on either my Sohmer or Steinway consoles.  I tune my upmost octave strictly in doubles to maximize the ringing.  Anybody that has room and money for a real piano should have these pieces demonstrated on any digital they intend to buy versus even a modest console or studio piano in proper repair.

[prongated]

Some people don't believe that there are actually tone variations in piano playing, and from certain arguments I 'get' how the reasoning would work.

You know, I thought so too...until I find out what the double escapement action actually does...and can do.

There are at least 3 ways you can alter tone this way. You can strike the notes very quickly without going beyond where the "bumps" are to create a very smooth, legato sound. Or you can strike the notes to the bottom of the key without creating a lot of friction between the "roller" (or the "knuckle") and the hammer shank, which will give you a rich, resonant sound. Or, you can strike the notes to the bottom of the key in a very articulate manner so that the friction does occur, in which case you will get a very clear and articulate sound from the piano.

Some digital piano makers have tried emulating the double escapement "bump" of course, but the "bump" is not there in an acoustic piano just because it feels nice right?

[daniloperusina]

I've always wondered about the dynamics in a digital. In order to go from pp to ff, how have they done it? Is it like there's 10 or so different samples per note?
On an acoustic piano there is no such "limit" of course.
There's been research done on the hammer, and this is one of the clues to the variety of sound you can produce on a piano.
The hammer itself consists of felt. Depending on the force of the blow, the felt slightly alters it's physical/mechanical properties. When the blow is soft, the felt is like a soft spring that gently bounces on the strings. This also causes the hammer to stay in contact with the strings a certain amount of time, long enough to dampen higher harmonics that were excited by the impact. These harmonics move fast enough to be able to move along the string and return while the hammer is still in contact, and thus they will be 'stopped'. This is what causes the particularly soft and mellow sound when we play pp on a well-intonated piano. When the blow is hard it compacts the felt and makes the hammer behave less like a spring. It now bounces very rapidly away from the strings, and the higher harmonics will now be more and more prominent, causing 'clarity' in the sound. There is a sort of limitless range already here, and added to all the other things already mentioned above makes the idea that a digital one could replace the acoustic one seem basically impossible. And what about loudspeakers vs soundboard?

[4greatkeyboards]

Well, LOTS is wrong with them. But that said, they are getting better.

I play Chopin and Rachmaninoff and other late Romantic. My Fatar Studiologic  Vmk-188 midi-controller combined with Gigastudio 3 and Post Musical Instruments Bosendorfer B-290 samples surpassed my Kauai 5-foot grand and I sold it (after 20 years!).

I made that switch in September 2008 and I was CAPTIVATED by its sound and performance.

Unfortunately, last week my system died and now I must change everything except for the Vmk-188. My Sample Drive (7200 rpm 200 GB) died on my Sager (Clevo)  NP9262 laptop (Intel Core 2 Quad 2.83 GHZ and $3000 !) purchased new in September 2008. Apparently Gigastudio 3 (now defunct) worked it to death.

So while I am recovering, I started using my Yamaha S-80 Synth for daily practice and guess what? The passages I have been laboring over, as muddled, are crystal clear ( Chopin Etude Opus 10 No. 4 at 128 BPM.) That shows me that with my setup Gigastudio/Post could not keep up with even my single piano instrument, much less an orchestra in the background. GS was oversold, I think.

So to recover here's what I plan. Back to Acoustic? No. I am upgrading my hard disk drives to Solid State drives (Kingston '325 128 GB both System and Sample drives), my ram memory from 4GB to 8GB. And my virtual instrument software to Quantum Leap Bosendorfer. Sounds best to me. See and hear article at:
  https://www.keyboardmag.com/article/ultimate-software-pianos/oct-08/87255

Does anyone else have ideas on this?

Regards.

PS:
    But if you'd like to swing on a star,
    And be better off than you are,
    And if you'd like to be in the Pink...
    You may be better than you think!

     (If you speed up your system!)

[Bob]

Touch -- I haven't played on one that feels like an acoustic.  A lot have a squishy key bed that I really don't like.  The closest one I've played on still didn't have the feeling of length to the keys that even an upright has.

Tone -- It's always a decent tone.  It doesn't matter how you hit the key, it sounds ok.  But if you do that on an acoustic, it can sound harsh.

Makes things too easy -- Like tone.  I'm thinking of voicing.  I don't know exactly why it is but I have no trouble with voicing on one digital but do have trouble with the same music on an acoustic.

[richard black]

Does anyone else have ideas on this?

Yes - avoid MIDI, for reasons outlined in my original post in this thread.

[roseli]

I agree. A digital piano it's not a real piano and never will be. but they are cheap and the best for people who lives in apartment. have to give them credit for that...

[doreen]

They're dead .There's no life in them what so ever. You all know what I'm talking about, right?

[lostinidlewonder]

But there are two pretty major limitations. One is technical. I don't care how sophisticated your sampling is, _at best_ an electronic instrument can be no better than a recording of a piano, and any recording engineer will confirm that piano is one very difficult instrument to record and play back convincingly. Audiophiles spend many thousands of $ buying loudspeakers which still don't really reproduce piano entirely convincingly.

There is one advantage however of recording digital pianos and that is taking away the air medium between the recording device and the instrument (digital piano directly to computer). This is something that is extremely difficult to deal with when recording an acoustic piano.

At the moment we have not advanced technologically far enough in digital pianos to create the exact sound of a physically vibrating string hit by a hammer. There are literally infinite touches you can produce with a top quality real piano, digital pianos only ever can give an estimate of what you do (and they are getting better at it as our technology progresses) and thus takes away a lot from someones playing (not that everyone can hear it but most avid piano music listeners can notice it).

And of course, as regards the recording and replay bit, where do you put the microphone? The sound coming from a piano varies _a lot_ depending on where one stands, note by note. A lot of the richness of tone of a fine piano in a good concert venue comes from the way the sound bounces around and mixes from various directions at the listener's seat. No synth I've seen has any like this richness and although it could be done it would cost probably about as much as a real concert piano!

It is much harder to do professional recordings of a digital piano via the air medium compared to an acoustic, thus you would want to connect the digital directly to your recording device (PC or what have you). I am not talking about a MIDI connection but actually connecting a digital directly to a computer and record the exact sound that is synthesized by the digital. I use to do a lot of that when I had my Yamaha Clavinova back in 1998 and at that time I could produce recordings recorded directly into the computer from the Clav, I was so impressed with not having to deal with the air in recording and the recordings are very clean and crisp without noise, however there is something missing, how the sound reverberates through a room can be missing, but not everyone find that important.

But there's still a major blind alley intrinsic to the whole process of making a 'digital piano', and that is that it is an attempt to copy a pre-existing instrument. This is actually something new: when Cristofori invented the piano he wasn't trying to make it sound like a harpsichord! The electric guitar is a new instrument using the same interface and notation as the Spanish guitar, and the Hammond organ was never intended to mimic a church organ.

Yes in our time now the new digital instrument needs to replicate the real piano as close as possibly. We no longer really need to improve the function of the acoustic piano itself but rather make its dimensions and mass a lot less and still produce a "real" sound. There are some impossible things to deal with, like how with a real concert grand piano the whole instrument vibrates with the sound produced from it, it is a massive beast which "hums" with its entire body. A digital piano is a feeble small little box and its structure is not meant to improve the sound coming from it as it uses electricity and speakers to deal with it.

Can speakers advance far enough to produce something that resembles a real concert grand playing? At the moment I don't think so with the piano, however there was one interesting study done with a real pipe organ vs  digital pipe organ, I recall reading a few years ago (sorry I can't exactly remember where it was held). But there where a group of music students blindfolded and asked to determine which was the real and which was the digital and the results where pretty much 50/50. But the pipe organ is much different to the acoustic piano, I personally believe the piano has much more complicated sounds. Some 20 years ago when I listened to digital piano recordings I could notice it immediately, nowadays it is becoming slightly more difficult but we can still tell the difference between acoustic and digital quite easily.

The big irony, it seems to me, is that keyboard synths can be wonderful things when they are producing sounds unimaginable before the age of electronics. There are some very fine keyboard players, especially in the worlds of jazz and rock, who play on keyboards stuff that would absolutely not work on piano.

Digital pianos defeat acoustic pianos on many levels (but overall is crushed by the superior sound of an acoustic piano) obviously the leading reasons: Never have to tune and easy to move around. Their functions and options can also give you an entire orchestra at your finger tips, which is absolutely incredible. I remember when I was 6 years old playing with my first digital keyboard and was so amazed I could play all sorts of instruments as well.

However one thing about digitals is that it can make you bored of the piano, for me at least. The sound is so boring, the colors produced are so estimated, it just hasn't got the same feeling as a real piano, you cannot sense strings vibrating, you cannot sense the hammers are a part of your fingers as they touch the strings, and probably worst of all the pedals never do the right thing (the problems with the estimated sound production is multiplied furthermore when the digital piano tries to emulate the use of a sustain or una corda, all digitals fail at this miserably no matter how much money you pay) I also hear real pianos sometimes in my imagination as I play as a wind instrument, that is the sound coming from it breathes out of it, however with digital pianos I never get this sensation unless I change the instrument sampling on it! I love playing digitals on pipe organ setting, or strings or voices. It is absolutely incredible to blast out a Bach Prelude and Fugue or Toccata on max volume.

[synthex]

?

[gyzzzmo]

digital is da devil!

[synthex]

?

[horowitzian]

[...] easy to move around. [...]

I used to have a Clavinova...it was too light to stand still yet too heavy to be moved easily. 

The many voices were fun, though.

[timothy42b]

I love playing digitals on pipe organ setting, or strings or voices. It is absolutely incredible to blast out a Bach Prelude and Fugue or Toccata on max volume.

We skip over the bells and whistles in these discussions, I think too quickly.  I guess it's blindingly obvious that no acoustic can compete, so we dismiss it as unimportant to the true pianist. 

Probably you consider yourself an artist, focused on the music.  I don't; I'm a mere craftsman, focused on the audience. 

What a digital can do for an audience is largely untapped.  I hear most people playing them as a substitute piano.  And as a substitute piano they have certain limitations in sound (though in most acoustic environments it's probably not detectable.) 

But they're really not a substitute piano out in the workplace, right?  They're more like a substitute orchestra, complete with strings, brass, novelty percussion, memory loops, etc. 

It's still rare to hear anyone do more than scratch the surface of what is possible.  Occasionally we get glimpses and the audience responds. 

[scottmcc]

I paid under 2K for a brand new Roland, which has a very convincing sound and action, and can be made completely silent such that I can practice early in the morning while others are sleeping.  It never needs to be tuned and has a very realistic action.  I played various acoustic instruments at several different stores, and the cheapest instrument that I liked was over 20k, and the Steinway that I really wanted was 60k, which is about as much money as I make in a year.

I paid 600 for a very portable Yamaha digital for use when I travel, which unfortunately I do a fair amount with my job.  It fits in the back of my car, has a damper pedal, and with headphones it doesn't bother the neighbors.  It sounds pretty bad, the action isn't all that great, but it's a lot better than not playing, and I'd much rather know that it's available in my room than scrounge around looking for a church piano to play, especially as most of those are painfully out of tune.

So if I had the money, I'd be all over the Steinway, but in the interim, I'm not scoffing at what I have.  I'm not good enough yet to justify such an expenditure.

[richard black]

I agree with what timothy42b says a couple of posts up (not quoted to save space). But ironically, of course, old-fashioned _analogue_ keyboards are in many ways more flexible than digital ones. It's in the nature of digital technology that the very thing that makes it easy to use - its switch-on-and-use repeatability - works against truly imaginative generation of sounds.

[cmg]

These digital piano threads on this forum always seem to verge on the weird. If you check out, for example, the very active and informative thread on DPs and Synths on Piano World's Piano Forum you will read very animated and highly informed opinions on digital pianos by people who ACTUALLY play them professionally and routinely practice on them.

No on argues that they are superior, or even equal, to a GOOD, in-tune and regulated acoustic piano-sound reproduction.  Only that they are a reasonable substitute for an acoustic.  And why would anyone subsitute a digital for an acoustic?  Apartment living, for one.  In large cities, you get threatened with evictions and lawsuits if you don't practice your acoustic during proscribed hours! Here, the digital has obvious advantages and the latest advances in wooden, weighted keys by Roland (the V-Piano) and Kawai are perfectly satisfying and are actually better than most acoustic-junk/spinet/ consolette/upright actions that most folks have in their homes.  Not to mention the crap practice pianos that infest and torment conservatory students all over the world!

I have a Steinway grand, over 40 years old, that I love, but my neighbors hate it at night, so I do much of my practicing on my Kawai MP8II with state-of-the-art headphones.  Believe me, the sound I make is often better than my Steinway, which needs constant attention and expense to sound its best.  The action on the Kawaii is actually slightly heavier than the Steinway and almost exactly mimics the grand acoustic in bounceback, etc.   Moving between the two instruments is not detrimental.  The feel of the acoustic, of course, does have a very slight edge of greater responsiveness to it, but only when I'm playing at very fast tempi and only when it involves lightning-fast ornaments or repeated notes.  It takes more care and preparation to bring them off, but bring them off I can.  To practice, obviously, one uses very slow tempi. So, the digital again represents no significant compromise.  


Pianist friends of mine who live in free-standing homes with acoustic grands STILL use digitals. Very few family members can tolerate hearing a pianist practicing for hours.  Believe me.  The digitals solve that dilemma.

I bet that the biggest critics of digitals here are not the biggest users of them.  I was skeptical, too, but soon realized after hours and weeks and months using them that are really marvelous stand-ins for acoustics.      

[richard black]

Nothing in cmg's post really contradicts anything in my original one, nor vice-versa!