Dora wrote:
hey guys, I was thinking of getting a keyboard to mess around with, I use to have one when I was young, I even took classes in high school (and sucked, thus the fact I stopped playing lol) Any brand recommendations? Nothing too fancy but I wanna be able to learn vanessa songs on it
I recently bought a Roland RD-170 which I think is fantastic. It retails at $AUD2,800 though. I would definitely go with a digital piano rather than a keyboard though. I don't like keyboards because I always run out of keys when playing my songs!!! A keyboard is alright for playing Twilight though, lol.Also keyboards don't usually have weighted keys and so the key touch is too light and it makes it harder to play a real acoustic piano. I'd advise against getting something really cheap, as apart from it sounding crap, it's unlikely to be very sophisticated in terms of polyphony, sustain, etc. If you don't have a sustain pedal, you'll run into problems making certain songs sound right. (Eg. songs like "Annie".)
In terms of sound, keyboards and digital pianos make sound when you play the keys because each note has been sampled by a piano sound (or an organ, or whatever sound you're playing with.) Each key must be sampled many times with different touches (eg. lightly playing with a soft touch, or banging on the keys Beethoven style, or inbetween), so when you play, as you don't apply the same amount of pressure to all the notes in a song, the electronic sound will recognize this accordingly. Many cheap keyboards aren't touch sensitive like this, and so if you play loudly, with lots of pressure on the keys, or softly, with not much pressure, the notes will be at the same volume- the only control over volume is the volume switch.
Hope this helps.