So I have this digital piano.
Or keyboard.
Or whatever, let’s not get hung up on the nomenclature.
I’ve had it for about 5 years -
I’m no professional pianist but I do enjoy tickling those synthetic ivories from time to time,
enough to be bothered by a keyboard without weighted keys.
But it also didn’t make sense to spend lots of money on some ultra-lavish thing
because my level of piano proficiency would waste such an instrument.
So I got this.
Hold on, I just gotta boot it up.
♫ Windows XP startup sound ♫
That’s right, it’s still No Effort in November,
and this piana’s gonna learn us a thing or two about user interfaces.
And then we’ll talk about some other stuff.
Being the most basic model in Yamaha’s Arius line,
this model is pretty basic.
I mean, it’s even got a manual transmission
as you can see by the presence of the clutch pedal.
That was a joke.
Those are just your normal piano pedals.
Except of course they’re not real, they’re just switches.
But they’re not binary inputs either.
And also this piano handles the sustain pedal in a surprisingly wrong way which I’ll show you in a bit.
But anyway, like most keyboards this thing offers a fair degree of customizability
with things like key sensitivity, a slew of reverb options
(which are annoyingly always on by default)
different voices so you can pretend you’re an organist
or a harpsichordist
or annoy your friends like this.
♫ iPhone Marimba ringtone ♫
That voice is a vibraphone and not a marimba but who’s counting?
Oh, it also offers a built-in metronome and some other stuff.
It’s a pretty fully-featured if on the cheaper side instrument.
Look at the controls, though—
Hi! I’ve now edited the video and while I kinda thought this would be the case, uh
I just wanna make sure that you know... Yes, I’m aware you can't see the keyboard at all from where the camera is
but… remember what month it is.
So.
Just keep that in mind.
— Look at the controls, though, and you find there basically aren’t any.
That’s one of the concessions you make when you buy the cheap one.
Over here you have a power button and a volume control -
an actual potentiometer, even!
But, uh...
that’s it.
Over there you have a single button labeled Grand Piano Function.
I’m glad it can at least do that.
And, uh, well now we’re out of buttons.
That doesn’t seem like enough.
Apparently this thing has a bluetooth radio in it because of course it does
and there’s an app you can download for your phone to control things because of course there is
but all I can say to that is
“gross.”
Oh but it does have an integrated key cover!
Fancy!
I was perplexed by how the heck I was supposed to control this thing to change is settings,
but after staring at it for just a little while I thought
"oh" [said by a woman's voice coming from the piano]
That’s right, there’s a whole 88 other buttons sitting right here!
They’re just piano-ey.
Yamaha rather smartly designed this thing an awful lot like a computer keyboard
and this button here is your modifier key.
Like Alt.
Or Control.
Or Command.
Or Windows.
Or…
Function.
Press it once and it will revert back -
someone got mad at me for saying revert back so I said it again!
Be careful what you wish for -
it will revert back to being a standard piano from whatever function it was in.
Or at least a facsimile of a standard piano.
But if you hold the button down and then press one of the keys -
well, now you’ve done who knows what.
Like started a sample song.
♫ The Entertainer begins to play ♫ Oh good.
Can’t have a piano that can’t play the Entertainer.
Side-note. [ding]
I think Scott Joplin gets a bad or perhaps incomplete rap for being “the ragtime guy.”
Yeah, ragtime as a genre has a very particular sound,
but it doesn’t help that just about the only three pieces anyone ever hears are The Entertainer,
Maple Leaf Rag, and sometimes The Easy Winners.
Maybe Pine Apple Rag, too.
Basically everything that was in The Sting.
It also doesn’t help that people like to play these pieces ridiculously fast because, well,
♫ Maple Leaf Rag played ridiculsouly fast ♫
I mean it’s very fun.
But have you ever heard the second section of Solace?
♫
Bet you weren't expecting a piano recital now, were you?
Or the Magnetic Rag (a personal favorite of mine?)
♫
Appreciation for ragtime and indeed for Joplin seems to come in waves and, well,
maybe we’re overdue for another one.
Anyway,
Yamaha gives you a cheat sheet so you don’t have to memorize all of these.
They are grouped to help make this a little more obvious, though,
and they’ve put the most-likely-to-be-used functions at the very bottom (selecting voices)
and near middle C (the metronome).
Although, using the metronome is probably the most clunky experience of this scheme,
as you enter your desired beats per minute using these keys.
[a pre-recorded voice reads Six. Five. One. Two. Three.]
You can then have it read back to you the set speed.
[sixty-nine]
Nice.
Then you can turn it on or off and also adjust beats per measure and volume.
[One.
Two.
Oh.
One hundred twenty.
On. [metronome begins ticking]]
It does work, but honestly you’re better off just using an external metronome.
This probably isn’t the only keyboard in existence to use its keys in this way
but it nonetheless delights me.
Because it’s a very meta take on a user interface.
Every piano, going back to the days when we called it the pianoforte
(or fortepiano if you like that order better)
has some version of this keyboard.
And what are the keys themselves but a user interface?
Even an acoustic instrument of strings, mallets, and dampers has a UI and the keyboard (and pedals)
is that.
Using a simple modifier button to turn that centuries-old design
into a parameter-setting tool for the digital copy of the thing the design comes from is just…
I don’t know exactly but wow!
Outside of the UI thing, the evolution of digital pianos like this
is just a fascinatingly w e i r d blend of new technologies built into and around a very old interface
but the goal of each new development is to make it seem to behave exactly like the acoustic version it emulates.
It’s like engineering specifically for nostalgia -
each step forward is at the same time a step back and I love it.
I - Just think of what this thing is actually doing.
When you get right down to it, this is a really weird machine
that calls up a pre-recorded sound sample of a real piano producing a single note
the moment you push any one of these buttons.
They just happen to be shaped like piano keys.
Then it plays that sample through a pair of loudspeakers.
That’s just really goofy when you think about it, isn’t it?
But, if you press the buttons in the right order…
[Third part from Solace]
you get music.
But then again I suppose that’s exactly what happens with a real piano.
Anyway if you can’t tell thinking about this too hard makes my brain hurt.
I mean, it’s just a skeuomorphic nightmare.
So let’s talk about some of the things we’ve done to make fake pianos fake it better.
The earliest digital keyboards were basically sound-sample-caller-upper machines
and not much else at all.
In fact it might not have even been a sound sample or even digital, it could have been synthesized.
But that’s a horrible substitute for a real piano,
especially if the keyboard doesn’t have some kind of force detection.
Which early ones didn’t, and so each note sounded at the same loudness with every press.
Now this isn’t to say that early piano replacements weren’t cool in their own ways.
Electronic pianos certainly have their place and brought new and interesting sounds to the world of music.
And let’s not forget the earlier electric piano though that’s an entirely different beast.
And there are so many other weird concepts out there like the mellotron
which is an analog sample-caller-upper but again, different beast.
I’m solely talking about the continuing work to faithfully mimic a real piano in both sound and function.
To that end, we pretty quickly developed keys that could determine how hard they were pressed
by way of velocity detection
(basically each key has two switches at two different depths and it just determines how quickly the key moved between those two positions
to work out how hard you pressed it).
That was combined with new software which would alter the volume of the played sample based on that.
This allowed the player a similar degree of expressiveness as before
and brought the forte back into the piano.
But that’s not great, either.
Just playing the same sample at different volumes isn’t actually a good approximation
of what an actual piano actually sounds like actually.
In a real piano the key pushes a mallet into the strings
and the force of that strike changes not just the volume but also the timbre.
Softly-played notes are mellower and not as bright as keys gettin’ smashed.
So to add realism, digital pianos and keyboards started including multiple sound samples of every note,
recorded at different volumes on a real piano,
thus allowing for approximating that timbre difference.
How hard you press the key now determines not only how loud to play a sample
♫
but also which specific sample among a set
♫ !!
should be played for that note.
And what about how to stop playing the note?
Most keys on a piano lift a damper from the strings when you press them
and replace the damper when it is released.
That’s why a note continues as you hold the key but stops when you release it.
This piano does a simple quick fade-out of the sample when the key is lifted,
which honestly is close enough.
However, the sustain pedal (the one on the right)
allows the player a very important technique.
In a real piano, this pedal lifts all the dampers from the strings meaning every note will continue so long as the pedal is pressed.
This digital piano’s sustain pedal isn’t just an on-off switch and mimics partial-pedaling,
where the dampers are rested slightly on the strings which quiets them somewhat but not completely.
[loud chord is played, then suddenly gets quieter but doesn't stop]
This may not sound very important but trust me, it is.
Oh, and speaking of the pedals, I said earlier that this piano gets the sustain pedal wrong.
Here’s how.
If I were to play a loud chord with the pedal depressed,
then play the same chord again quietly but keep the keys held down with my finger thingies,
releasing the pedal shouldn’t do anything because I’m holding those virtual dampers off the strings with my fingers.
And yet…
[loud chord, soft strike on top, then it suddenly gets quieter]
Can you hear that?
[same sequence]
That is very wrong, and I cannot believe Yamaha screwed that up here.
Though in fairness they’ve only been making pianos since 1900.
It seems the logic in the piano reset the keys’ sustainedness status on the second press
and dampered the first loud sample that was started on the first keypress when I released the pedal but again,
that is very wrong and not how it should work at all.
Though, in fairness, I actually only recently discovered this so it’s not that bad.
Interestingly, though, this was handled correctly with the middle pedal.
Which is great because nobody ever uses that one!
Plus lots of pianos don’t even have it, and when they do there’s no set rule for what exactly it does.
Here it’s implemented as it often is in grand pianos.
Called the sostenuto pedal, this pedal will lock any dampers that are lifted the moment the pedal is depressed
but leave the rest alone.
Here’s what that sounds like in practice.
[a chord is played, then all the keys are played rapidly. When hitting the original chord, those notes are still sustained]
Hopefully you understand what’s going on here…
it’s not super easy to describe with words and if you’re not familiar with pianos
this might be baffling but in any case if I do the same thing as before and then lift the pedal,
[loud chord, soft chord, then no change]
now it correctly lets the original loud sample continue on until I actually release the keys.
I’m thinking if they got the middle pedal right,
somebody just forgot to put a line of code somewhere for the other one.
Oh, and the pedal on the left is known as the una corda or soft pedal.
In a nutshell it just makes the piano a bit quieter while it’s depressed.
A bit like this. [he said softly]
OK, so that’s about as far as this particular piano goes when it comes to the reproduction of sound,
but of course there’s also the fact that these keys themselves are weighted to mimic the feel of a real piano’s keys.
They’re even progressively weighted more heavily towards the left side of the keyboard
just like a real piano’s bass notes
because big hammer make key go slow.
But this is actually a pretty basic key-weighting system as things go.
They only get more complex from here,
and some digital pianos go so far as to implement actual, real piano actions
where a real keyboard moves real hammers that hit force sensors so basically it’s an actual piano
except the strings have been replaced with sensors and a computer.
Remember how I was saying digital pianos are a fascinatingly weird blend of new and old tech?
Yeah, those so-called hybrid pianos are the epitome of that sentiment.
Then of course there’s polyphony.
That word means a lot of different things depending on context and it’s confusing
so I’m not gonna touch it.
To end I want to talk about some of the other wild stuff that folks like Yamaha
are putting into their highest-end digital pianos.
Real pianos are much more acoustically complicated than a mix of sound samples played in the right order.
One of the most basic things this keyboard is missing is sympathetic vibrations.
With the sustain pedal depressed and all strings free to vibrate,
hitting any note will induce some vibrations in those other strings,
particularly those with harmonic frequencies shared with the original note.
This adds a richness to the notes played with the sustain pedal that this piano is not reproducing,
at least I’m not noticing it, but others do.
As you go up in price with digital pianos these days,
you not only get the niceties like real wooden keys and actual piano actions if you want,
oh but hold on if you’re buying one of these digital "grand pianos"…
just don’t.
I don’t understand how people find this impressive and not objectively goofy.
But anyway, over-the-top cases aside,
new software modeling allows these instruments to not only account for sympathetic vibrations of other strings
but also the acoustic profile of the piano’s soundboard and wooden case.
Combined with better and more powerful audio systems,
we’re at a point where digital pianos are realllllly close to their acoustic counterparts.
There are still reasons to have an acoustic piano, to be clear,
but there are also a lot of great benefits to these.
Perhaps chief among them is that they don’t weigh hundreds of pounds.
That’s nice.
Also very important to me is that they don’t lose their tuning.
Oh but on that note,
I only recently discovered that this piano allows you to play two voices at once.
One of my gripes with it is that it’s not a very bright sounding piano with its main voice,
and the brighter piano voice it does offer doesn’t sound that real to me.
Well, in a happy accident, if you select both piano voices
it puts the bright piano an octave up and makes a surprisingly nice change to the sound.
[arpeggiations]
What’s more, if you adjust that second voice back down to the original octave,
you end up with a detuned sound.
[a detuned sound as notes are played]
It's not quite honky-tonk, but more like a parlor sound,
which I personally find great for ragtime.
I hope you enjoyed this meandering off-the-cuff look at the world of digital pianos.
It’s by no means complete, and there are many rabbit holes you can fall into if you want,
so sorry if I sent you down one of those.
But for now, as Mozart would say,
toodles.