John French
Author and Musician
March 2024
The Piano Saga
31/03/24 20:42
Two months ago I was struck by a peculiar realization: My experience with making music for almost all of the last fifteen years has been through a laptop.
There's nothing wrong with this. There's an enormous world of music production hardware and software, an awful lot of which is highly accessible to anybody with a moderately powerful laptop, decent set of headphones, and bit of regular disposable income. Endless sonic exploration and construction can fit in a backpack. Digital audio workstation software such as Cubase, Logic, and Studio One are incredible environments for translating the sound in your head into complex compositions that can be refined and tweaked and arranged until you fall asleep over the keyboard at three in the morning, that one not-quite-catchy-enough section stuck in your thoughts.
But while fitting all that in your bag and being able to make music wherever life takes you is a gratifying reassurance, especially in your nomadic years, it had a very particular consequence for my relationship with music: I was spending so much of my "music time" on crafting a better tune, rather than intuitively inventing one. The tools themselves provided so much detail and precision that I was barely spending any time on actually composing music, and spending a heck of a lot more on arranging and shaping what I had put together. When you create and distribute your own work, you're responsible for not just composing and performing/programming it, but also mixing and mastering it, which are lengthy, iterative processes all their own. And now, with my time constrained by work, parenthood, and other hobbies (like making any progress on a third book), I was realistically having trouble even putting together one new piece of music a year, and most of that would be spent on refinement, not improvisation or discovery, which are much more fun.
I decided that this was not the relationship I wanted with music. When I was a kid, up through my teenage years, I was put through piano lessons across a few different teachers. Some of those relationships went better than others (thanks Marcus, sorry Sharon). I wasn't a great pianist, but the soulfulness of the instrument and a plentiful helping of music theory stuck with me. I decided having a piano in the house was the right move to make to rediscover the joy of simply being able to play, without any fiddling or friction.
My home is not large enough for a grand piano, even a small one. It just isn't (UK homes are small). An upright just about made sense - I trawled the Piano World forums for well-liked models. Despite much of the consensus being "Don't ask the internet, try it in person you idiot", there were a few modern models from different brands that seemed to be universally recommended. At the same time I saw some high regard for digital pianos, but having last meaningfully been exposed to the things more than ten years earlier, I was skeptical.
I made my way around a handful of showrooms, and tried out a number of instruments. I learned a couple things:
1) The acoustic upright pianos that I wanted to take home consistently cost 2-3x my budget. I took a real liking to Kawai's lineup (especially the K-200, what a delightfully complex tone) - there was a Danemann that I found pleasant as well. But I have little appetite for negotiating price on something like this, and that part of the experience left me less-than-excited.
2) Digital pianos have (mostly) evolved quite a lot since I last encountered them.
I sampled digital options from Yamaha, Kawai, and Roland. Nord, despite producing very interesting options, was out of the running as they didn't seem to provide the 'furniture appliance' experience, and no dealers within a sane range offered anything from Casio.
Here is my evaluation of the various options:
Yamaha's Clavinova line seemed nice at first glance, but this luster faded quickly. The keybeds were adequate, but the quality of the sample sets and cabinet speakers produced a distinctly artificial tone, a bit muffled at best, flat at worst. Together with controls that evoked a 2003 TV remote vibe, the experiences of the CLP-735 and CLP-745 were not great.
Kawai's 2024 CA series had some interesting quirks. The keybeds were terrific, and the newest sample sets were of a higher quality than what Yamaha had to offer. The cabinet speakers across their lineup ranged from "decent" to "actually rather good". The controls were nearly as clunky as those on the Yamaha offerings. I think if my search had ended there I might have ended up taking home a CA-401 and felt good about it.
But then it was over to Roland. The keybeds were nice, to my fingers maybe a slight step back from Kawai, and the controls seemed a little more intuitive to my eyes. The sound they produced had a distinct 'feel' from the other two brands; the reason for this is that when it comes to piano simulation, the other models available under £2000 rely on complex sample sets (essentially libraries of micro-recordings of real pianos that are triggered and combined in response to the player). Roland's options instead rely on a modeling approach, where the instrument synthesizes a custom piano tone that's tailored to your taste and space. With some easy tinkering it made the instrument feel alive, and that was very interesting.
(I should note that build quality was impeccable across all three manufacturers. When you're paying over a thousand pounds for an instrument you expect it to be well made, and nobody disappointed on this front.)
The emotional, calming delight of communing with an instrument is essential part of the musical experience, and finding it in a digital instrument surprised me. Ultimately I found it in three such digital instruments during my tour, and I took home the cheapest of them: a Roland HP704. The other two - a bigger, more expensive Roland LX model and a significantly more expensive Kawai - were both very nice, but I'd found my sweet spot.
Having lived with it for a little while now, I have notes for the fine people at Roland, but none of true consequence. It's well-made, feels great to play, and has made family and guests pause to indulge in its house-filling sound from even the most random noodling sessions. It can act as a top-notch MIDI controller for those times I want to bring out the laptop. But most of all, it's simply been fun to have a piano right there in the house, ready to bring a dull moment of the day to life with no notice at all. And sometimes I'll catch my kids opening it to dawdle on the black and whites completely unprompted. I can't ask for more than that.
There's nothing wrong with this. There's an enormous world of music production hardware and software, an awful lot of which is highly accessible to anybody with a moderately powerful laptop, decent set of headphones, and bit of regular disposable income. Endless sonic exploration and construction can fit in a backpack. Digital audio workstation software such as Cubase, Logic, and Studio One are incredible environments for translating the sound in your head into complex compositions that can be refined and tweaked and arranged until you fall asleep over the keyboard at three in the morning, that one not-quite-catchy-enough section stuck in your thoughts.
But while fitting all that in your bag and being able to make music wherever life takes you is a gratifying reassurance, especially in your nomadic years, it had a very particular consequence for my relationship with music: I was spending so much of my "music time" on crafting a better tune, rather than intuitively inventing one. The tools themselves provided so much detail and precision that I was barely spending any time on actually composing music, and spending a heck of a lot more on arranging and shaping what I had put together. When you create and distribute your own work, you're responsible for not just composing and performing/programming it, but also mixing and mastering it, which are lengthy, iterative processes all their own. And now, with my time constrained by work, parenthood, and other hobbies (like making any progress on a third book), I was realistically having trouble even putting together one new piece of music a year, and most of that would be spent on refinement, not improvisation or discovery, which are much more fun.
I decided that this was not the relationship I wanted with music. When I was a kid, up through my teenage years, I was put through piano lessons across a few different teachers. Some of those relationships went better than others (thanks Marcus, sorry Sharon). I wasn't a great pianist, but the soulfulness of the instrument and a plentiful helping of music theory stuck with me. I decided having a piano in the house was the right move to make to rediscover the joy of simply being able to play, without any fiddling or friction.
My home is not large enough for a grand piano, even a small one. It just isn't (UK homes are small). An upright just about made sense - I trawled the Piano World forums for well-liked models. Despite much of the consensus being "Don't ask the internet, try it in person you idiot", there were a few modern models from different brands that seemed to be universally recommended. At the same time I saw some high regard for digital pianos, but having last meaningfully been exposed to the things more than ten years earlier, I was skeptical.
I made my way around a handful of showrooms, and tried out a number of instruments. I learned a couple things:
1) The acoustic upright pianos that I wanted to take home consistently cost 2-3x my budget. I took a real liking to Kawai's lineup (especially the K-200, what a delightfully complex tone) - there was a Danemann that I found pleasant as well. But I have little appetite for negotiating price on something like this, and that part of the experience left me less-than-excited.
2) Digital pianos have (mostly) evolved quite a lot since I last encountered them.
I sampled digital options from Yamaha, Kawai, and Roland. Nord, despite producing very interesting options, was out of the running as they didn't seem to provide the 'furniture appliance' experience, and no dealers within a sane range offered anything from Casio.
Here is my evaluation of the various options:
Yamaha's Clavinova line seemed nice at first glance, but this luster faded quickly. The keybeds were adequate, but the quality of the sample sets and cabinet speakers produced a distinctly artificial tone, a bit muffled at best, flat at worst. Together with controls that evoked a 2003 TV remote vibe, the experiences of the CLP-735 and CLP-745 were not great.
Kawai's 2024 CA series had some interesting quirks. The keybeds were terrific, and the newest sample sets were of a higher quality than what Yamaha had to offer. The cabinet speakers across their lineup ranged from "decent" to "actually rather good". The controls were nearly as clunky as those on the Yamaha offerings. I think if my search had ended there I might have ended up taking home a CA-401 and felt good about it.
But then it was over to Roland. The keybeds were nice, to my fingers maybe a slight step back from Kawai, and the controls seemed a little more intuitive to my eyes. The sound they produced had a distinct 'feel' from the other two brands; the reason for this is that when it comes to piano simulation, the other models available under £2000 rely on complex sample sets (essentially libraries of micro-recordings of real pianos that are triggered and combined in response to the player). Roland's options instead rely on a modeling approach, where the instrument synthesizes a custom piano tone that's tailored to your taste and space. With some easy tinkering it made the instrument feel alive, and that was very interesting.
(I should note that build quality was impeccable across all three manufacturers. When you're paying over a thousand pounds for an instrument you expect it to be well made, and nobody disappointed on this front.)
The emotional, calming delight of communing with an instrument is essential part of the musical experience, and finding it in a digital instrument surprised me. Ultimately I found it in three such digital instruments during my tour, and I took home the cheapest of them: a Roland HP704. The other two - a bigger, more expensive Roland LX model and a significantly more expensive Kawai - were both very nice, but I'd found my sweet spot.
Having lived with it for a little while now, I have notes for the fine people at Roland, but none of true consequence. It's well-made, feels great to play, and has made family and guests pause to indulge in its house-filling sound from even the most random noodling sessions. It can act as a top-notch MIDI controller for those times I want to bring out the laptop. But most of all, it's simply been fun to have a piano right there in the house, ready to bring a dull moment of the day to life with no notice at all. And sometimes I'll catch my kids opening it to dawdle on the black and whites completely unprompted. I can't ask for more than that.
