This is despite the fact that digital pianos can last a long time. An inferior instrument will cost you business. I’ve seen this before, when I used to teach for a music school that used old Technics digital pianos from the 1990s. You don’t want good students coming to your house and deciding your piano isn’t good enough. If you’re a teacher, this is even more important. It’s important to set yourself up for learning as best you can – you want your instrument to last you as long as possible, not for you to outgrow it in two or three years. That got frustrating very quickly, to the point where I sold my keyboard and bought a Yamaha Arius.Īs I’ve mentioned, this doesn’t just apply to college music majors – this is an issue that almost every pianist will run into as they progress past a certain skill level. I would be holding notes down, expecting the sound to continue, and because there was so much else going on, by the time I had released the pedal expecting to hear the notes, they weren’t there. When I was at college, practicing Liszt, Chopin, Brahms, etc, I found that my 48 note digital keyboard simply wasn’t enough. You may have read this far and be thinking “yeah, right – I really don’t see how I’ll ever produce that much noise from my piano!” You’d be surprised. This is especially true if you’re mixing voices – for example, if you want to have a piano and strings sound for a ballad or something. If you’re using your piano to perform, as a stage piano or to give concerts, you can’t afford to have an inferior instrument jeapordise your performance. This is especially true if you’re using your digital piano to play classical music, where you often have several different things going on at once in each hand. This is because if you buy a piano with too low polyphony, you’ll find it frustrating when you progress beyond a certain level and you’re trying to make music but sounds keep getting cut off. Polyphony is i mportant to every digital piano player in every genre. It’s not fun if the sound keeps cutting out every so often when this could easily have been resolved by buying a better piano. The term “sounds” refers to two different things – the number of individual notes you’re playing, and the number of voices you’re using on the piano (strings, harpsichord, vibraphone, etc – whatever your digital piano offers.)
You may or may not notice this, depending on what you’re playing. If you go over this limit, the piano will simply cut off some of the sounds to make room for the newer sounds. A digital piano doesn’t.ĭigital pianos nowadays generally have a polyphony of around 128 or above, although I’ve seen some as low as 64-note polyhony ( Yamaha P45) or 48-note polyphony ( the Casio CDP-130.) All this literally means is that you can have 64 or 48 different sounds playing at once. So if you were to put the sustain pedal down and play every note one-by-one, you would have 88 separate sounds.Īn acoustic piano, because the sound is dynamically generated by the instrument and isn’t recorded like on a digital piano, theoretically has unlimited polyphony. The sustain pedal stops the notes on the piano getting cut off after you release the key, and elongates the sound. You see, on a piano, the main thing that makes this complicated is the pedal.