Alright, music geeks, time to spare Sammy G some advice.
I’m looking for an 88-key, hammer-weight keyboard for use in the studio. I need something that will simply act as a slave device for recording into Logic/Cakewalk/etc.
I never got into the programming aspects of the T1, and by now its onboard technology is beyond obsolete. You won’t believe this, but the 3.5 floppy still sitting in the T1 drive is a Babbage’s disk, with Matt’s handwriting, that reads “Matt’s Disk.” That’s how little I used the programming side of the T1 over its 14-year existence. Now, the T1 is a this heavy, klunky artifact that still works, but has bugs that I’m forced to work around whenever I turn it on.
Anyway, trying to find a decent, slave board. Thanks for any advice!
Anything Yamaha
Any 88-key Yamaha with weighted action. I’ve been using my Clavinova CVP-59S for years now, and the weighted key action is the most true to a “real” piano action that I’ve ever used.
It’s patented, and they’ve licensed it to a few other keyboard makers (Roland, I think, is one licensee, though I could be wrong).
The only problem with my Yamaha is that it lacks a pitch bend or mod wheel (or the newer “joystick-style” control which combines pitch bend and mod wheel into one). I’ll be buying a tiny little MIDI controller to give me that functionality, and if I bind my channels correctly, it’ll bend the Yamaha’s notes for me.
Anyway, that’s my humble opinion. Yamaha weighted action is definitely really good. Their piano samples aren’t bad either.
The rest of the sample sets on other Yamaha’s I’ve used …. meh. Not good, not bad. I prefer to use larger sample sets on a software synthesizer. But then, of course, I’m adding a $2,000 computer to my $4,000 digital piano to make my instrument.
Maybe I should have played the oboe.
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Matthew P. Barnson
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Thought for the moment: