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[music] Beginner's keyboard
Impersonator
Registered User
Registered User
I'm really into buying a keyboard but I don't know which one although I've already come down to two:
Yamaha PSRE303, for the lovely price of 20 EUR/30 USD
and the
Medeli MC 36 Einsteiger, for the lovely price of 55 EUR/80 USD
Which do you think is the best one?
Yamaha PSRE303, for the lovely price of 20 EUR/30 USD
and the
Medeli MC 36 Einsteiger, for the lovely price of 55 EUR/80 USD
Which do you think is the best one?
Impersonator on
Lemmings was pro-Communist propeganda. All are created equal, sorted into specific jobs and roles that they will hold for the rest of their lives by a higher authority, and must sacrifice continuously for the good of the group. Success is measured by meeting quotas and nothing else. Also, nuclear holocaust.
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If your goal is to learn to play the piano, those aren't gonna be what you're looking for I think. At a bare minimum you want 88 keys and weighted keys. I don't know if the first one has weighted action keys(I also didn't see how many keys it has but the second has 49)but it has the touch response, which is good, but without weighted keys it's kinda annoying and it'll be hard to play at a consistent volume
Without those two things I think you're just way too far from a piano for it be an effective learning device, even if you're just a beginner
However if that's your price range, well get what you can. You want the one with more polyphony and more tones, basically
For an example, this was one I'm considering
http://musical-instruments.pricegrabber.com/digital-pianos/m/9731039/
That's sposed to be a good digital piano for the price, though I'm probably gonna get the slightly more expensive PX-200
Oh and the Yamaha has 61 keys!
I really think the Yamaha one is the best keyboard of the two and for the price of 30usd..
Even if you're going to want to be a keyboardist who never touches real pianos, it's always better to have weighted keys. The only way those keyboards are acceptable are if you only have $30 to spend, will never ever get near a piano, will not be taking lessons, and will only be playing simple chords with no need for anything sounding better than craptastic MIDI. So I guess if you're playing keys for a very casual rock band only, then they're fine.
What is it you want to do, though? Are you going to take lessons? You should. What will you be learning for? Will you use this keyboard in rehearsals/gigs?
If you are getting a keyboard, minimum it should have weighted, full sized keys. This pushes the price up considerably, but it's worth it. The only keyboard I have without this is my 2-octave Oxygen-8 which I only use as an input device for finale. I do, on occasion, have to play on non-weighted 3/4 sized keyboards. Once for an actual performance, and this spring when a group I play for is on tour I have to do it for the tour when there's not a real piano available. I hate it every time I do, because they're just so cramped and sound crappy and feel wrong.
So yeah, get better ones, unless you absolutely have only $30 to spend.
And take lessons. Self-teaching an instrument is pretty much always a horrible idea. If you learn an instrument yourself, you are 99% more likely to learn poor technique, which not only will make it harder to play and harder to learn new stuff or play hard stuff, but it's much more likely to result in injury(And yes, even with really heavily trained technique I have had minor injuries from playing piano)
Khavall's Beginner's Guide to Music Everything(Theory Blog)
If you're going to take piano lessons, you'll probably play on a real piano for the lessons, and I've no experience with this, but people who do often say a non-suitable keyboard is of literally no value for practicing for those lessons. It'd be like trying to learn guitar by buying a three or four string guitar and instead of having frets you had like buttons or something awkwardly different like that
It's kind of similar to learning classical guitar on a rock guitar, or even vice versa. You can learn the basics, but your technique will be all sorts of fucked up, everything will feel wrong, you'll miss hella intervals because you can't feel as well... it's just not a good idea.
Khavall's Beginner's Guide to Music Everything(Theory Blog)
Hey, thanks for the reply
No, I'm not planning on learning to play Piano, I just want a keyboard for not too complex music compositions, you know, I've grown tired of using the piano roll manually on fruityloops, I'd just like to have more control on what I can produce and I think a simple keyboard, like the ones I refered to in the OP, are the way to go
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Oxygen8v2-main.html
More expensive that you seem to be looking for, but it requires no extra power supply, can be taken anywhere with you, it's gorgeous.
Now if all you want is the cheapest one, then just go with the cheaper one, because you'll also most likely need a MIDI-USB cable. If all it's being used for is MIDI input, you can have it in one place, and you'll not be learning to play on it... cheap is good.
Khavall's Beginner's Guide to Music Everything(Theory Blog)
Browse around local stores sites, or places like Amazon.com. You can sometimes find go deals. As well, I highly recommend purchasing from SweetWater.com. They are usually cheaper and do free shipping on a lot of items, plus, they give you candy.
http://www.thelostworlds.net/
water spirals the wrong way out the sink
Yeah, there are some times when a high-end keyboard is justified. I personally am really big on the semi-pedaling abilities in the new Yamaha's, as well as their action response getting so much better. But then again, I live and die by the quality of practicing and sound I can get. I mean I'm snobby to the point that I'm unhappy whenever I have to play on an upright.
But for the most part? If you find on that's weighted and has full-sized keys, that's all you need to be practicing for most piano playing.
Khavall's Beginner's Guide to Music Everything(Theory Blog)
Remember that a digital piano is just playing a recorded real piano when you hit a key. I think the PX-110 has 11 tones, meaning that there are only 11 recorded different tones, and those have their frequency increased or decreased to produce different pitches, or amplitudes jacked up or down to change volume
Problem is, as anyone who's played an acoustic piano knows, there's a lot more to it than that. Notes sound different if played loud or soft, in combination with other notes(because of sympathetic vibrations from the sounded strings)and so on, and that's one of the limitations of the digital piano(the PX200 has more than 11, but even 11 is a pretty ok number, so ideally there'd be well more than 88 tones)
Polyphony is the number of sounds it can make at once. At face value that would appear to mean if you have 32 polyphony, that you could sound 32 notes at once, and that's the idea, but the way the audio channels work some notes take up more than one. Most keyboards that don't have huge polyphony(the PX200 has 128 I think)have to cut out notes. Good ones will actually cut out notes masked by others while bad ones just do first on first off. So hit two prominent bass notes, hold the pedal, and start playing chords. On a bad one eventually one of the bass notes will cut out, which is acoustically startling, on a good one you couldn't tell what notes were being dropped
But you'd have to be picky and have a little extra disposable income to even care, like me. Still haven't bought one, I'm notoriously bad about pulling the trigger on big purchases ^_^