Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Is the Acoustic Piano market on the way out?

Whilst I hope that there will always be people who can afford to own and maintain a quality acoustic instrument ( sales of Rolls Royce motor cars have steadily increased over the past five years, when those of mass market producers have slumped),

I am beginning to agree with Dewster, in that DP manufacturers have sat on their hands for far too long, content to supply an eager mass market with inferior products, in the interests of 'shifting boxes'.

If a relatively small outfit, such a Moddart, can bring us an amazing, (if not yet, totally convincing) product, just imagine what the 'Big 4' could develop, with their huge R&D budgets, and technical resources!

Pianoteq...does it play with that connectedness that elevates it to an actual instrument? No. In my opinion it does not. No tactile feedback whatsoever.

The ideal would be a combination of sampling and modeling.

Snazzy

Acoustic pianos go out of tune the way they want to, not the way you want them to. So this sword cuts both ways.

If you like a particular couple of notes out of tune a particular amount, you can program any digital to do so. Or, with the press of a button you can play any digital in any historical temperament, or any weird modern tuning you can come up with.

Play a simple Bach piece in three different temperaments, back to back, so you can compare. This is easy on a digital. Impossible, on an acoustic (unless you're rich enough to buy three of them!)

I practise on a digital, have my lesson on a digital, and get on a decent acoustic once a week at church. I like having the opportunity to play both. Even at my level there are some things I like better about the acoustic. But also there are some mechanical defects I notice, even with our Steinway grand. The touch is not predictably even across the keyboard, dampers don't all respond the same, etc. As we advance and become more discriminating we find more things to dislike about the digital, but if we are honest we could say the same of the acoustic.

I think that at some level of market share, there are no longer enough of us with experience on both. At that point the digital wins by default, regardless of actual merit. We may be nearing that now. And as skilled tuner-technicians become scarce, the acoustics that survive sound worse.

One thing I wish digitals would do less well is emulate the bass notes. That growly non-pitch that makes the bottom few notes not useful on an acoustic is replicated on a digital. Why not extend the clean bass tone from a few notes higher right down the bottom?

The condition and care of an acoustic piano can greatly affect how it plays, feels, and sounds. Many "piano technicians" are nothing more than piano tuners, they don't have a clue about regulating the action or voicing the piano to make it play and sound it's best. An acoustic piano that is constantly going out of tune has issues that need to be fixed, once strings are "broken in" (i.e. most of the stretching has been finished), a good acoustic piano should stay in tune provided you are maintaining constant temperature and humidity levels. DPs are getting better all the time, one of these days they will sound and play well enough that you won't miss an acoustic piano. Are acoustic piano sales going down? I don't think anyone can ignore the obvious answer that they are rapidly falling, many people are opting for DPs and software pianos. I think there will always be some acoustic pianos around, but I think they are rapidly disappearing from most people's options.
Clyde

I think most of us here can remember a day before digital pianos. Our perception of "digital vs. acoustic" is based on the fact that we've known a world before digital pianos and have seen the creeping effect of digital pianos as they've entered the marketplace.

What I think will be interesting to watch is what happens as the next generation starts making their decisions. I know that, in my son's case, he sees my keyboard and acoustic piano as two different instruments and can already see the advantages and disadvantages of each. Just the other day he was complaining to me about a buzz that was coming from one of the long hinges on my K-3. Assuming that he never pursues the piano as a professional endeavor and becomes only a casual player, it will be interesting to see if he ever sees the "value" of having a real acoustic piano in his home. Already in his piano lessons at school they've started to incorporate the use of digital pianos both in practice and performance, including the use of other voices to accompany their playing.

Considering he's only 10 now, by the time he has his first job and the expendable income to purchase an instrument, I can only imagine what a digital piano is going to sound like.

We are already there. Software running on a notebook can recreate a piano. The weak link is the speakers and audio system. Good speakers and good amplifiers have always been expensive and remain so. The other expensive part of a digital piano is the key action. Hammer action keys have a certain minimum number of parts and must be very well built.

If you believe in Moore's law then the cost of the digital portion of the electronics will soon approach zero but the minimum cost of a DP is defined by parts not subject to this law, like the key action, the audio system, the case and the engineering cost of the samples or the model inside. The cost of software (and there is a lot of it inside a DP) is actually going up, not down. (I'm in the business and can say first hand how little software development $1M buys)

Already I'd estimate the cost of the digital electronics to not be driving the cost of a DP.

I think in the future we will see a wider gap between the cost of the best DPs and the low end. If you can live with cheap speakers and low cost key actions the there is noting to prevent someone from selling $100 DP's but if you demand a certain level of audio quality and power then I expect DP's to cost in the "few thousands" for quite some time.

I think over time smaller size upright pianos will become more and more rare. But the person who wants an acoustic grand piano is someone who has the space for one. Space typically costs MORE then the piano that fill it. So these buyers are not so senitive to price. But there are few of them.

Good thread, with the exception of Snazzy’s death wish for acoustic pianos and incessant pimping of the AG .

Studio production costs, concert venue maintenance costs, and rising costs of concert quality acoustic instruments and their maintenance have all been mentioned, and all are extremely pertinent. An instrument’s eccentricity, production of extraneous noise, predilection for being slightly out of tune – all that cuts both ways, as a recent poster pointed out. Tuning your home digital so that a couple of notes are pleasantly (to you) out of tune may please a few casual players conditioned to acoustic eccentricity, but, try that in an ensemble setting and see how popular you are. On top of everything else, music is an advertising and sales tool. More money is expended on finding the right mass-appeal jingle for a big brand-name product than is expended on a year’s concert series at most classical venues.

One aspect of the overall question that has been touched on only lightly is the relationship between the acoustic piano and the classical repertoire. If you spend any time on the (acoustic) Piano Forum here, you will notice that acoustic purism and the willingness to spend major bucks on an upscale acoustic piano is more often than not linked to DEAPS (the Dead European Appreciation and Preservation Society). Sure, there are jazz fans and even New Age folks who are in tune with exploiting the charms of an acoustic and willing to pay up for it, but in the main it is DEAPS that keeps solvent the mid to high-end part of the acoustic piano industry and all the cottage industries tethered to it.

What are the cottage industries? Classical method piano teachers, acoustic piano tuners and techs, classical-only recording labels, highbrow music critics, classical-only concert venues, professional piano evaluators such as LArry Fine, and last but not by a long shot least, music conservatories steeped in the values of so-called ‘serious’ music. Take away the enthusiasm for Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, etc., and the self-dedication or imposed parental dedication to achieving a degree of mastery of Dead European lit written for piano, take all that away, and the acoustic piano will begin to be a period instrument, exquisite and charming, but increasingly irrelevant.

Mastery of the notes, of the tempo, of the dynamics, of the indicated expression in classical lit is obsessive. A person needs obsessive dedication to get even part way there. In the instance of minimal talent played against lit of extreme difficulty, obsession may take the player to only the first level (the notes). Whereas jazz or pop notation invites you to explore, classical notation reminds you in every measure of your never-ending responsibility to stay on track.

Creativity, however, is frowned upon in the DEAPS world. Even in ‘professional’ critical reviews of top-tier concert pianists, a new approach to an old warhorse has a better chance of being panned than praised. Even so,the lit of the Dead Europeans continues to be re-worked, re-worked, and reworked again by both the few concert pianists who are actually able to support themselves from that activity, by the wannabes who claim to be concert pianists because of some solo gigs for church benefits or an appearance or three with a community orchestra, or by all those home enthusiasts who find beauty and solace in the unplugged lit of a simpler less convoluted era of human history.

Digital pianos offer a suite of options that entice any undisciplined player away from mastery and toward creativity. Whereas mastery can be measured against the standard of the notated page, creativity is simply a measure of the player’s enjoyment of whatever originality he is creating or the appeal of that which he has created to the listening public. Thus, many creative pianists who have wide popular appeal do not have the greatest technique, the greatest mastery, or the greatest ‘credentials’ in their piano pedagogy training.

It’s not really a question of which is better. Some people will gain a sense of fulfillment painting by the numbers, completing a Czerny exercise book, or completing basic training in a military service stint. Others will feel fulfilled by writing a personal blog, composing a pop song built on a standard chord progression, or mastering the ‘self’ through Tai-Chi, Yoga, or some fringe sort of transcendental meditation. It’s all good! Whatever works. Both can be personally rewarding. Neither interferes with anyone else’s self-fulfillment

Reduced to the simplest terms, the digital piano is about creativity. It invites exploration. Deviant options are many, in combination almost unlimited. Digital makers should worry less about the tedious pursuit of acoustic piano peculiarities and continue to expand the creative options (along with the dynamic and expressive range of ‘piano’ options). This approach conforms to strong contemporary ‘self’ trends such as the home performance studio, personal publishing, and the one-wire self-sufficient household.

Meanwhile, the acoustic piano industry should focus on Asia, and all evidence suggests that it is doing precisely that. Acoustic piano exhibitors at NAMM are shrinking in number while the big annual show in Shanghai is not to be missed. The successive booms in DEAPS membership in Japan and Korea are being dwarfed by the biggest boom of all possible DEAPS booms – the awakening of China to class consciousness and ‘refined’ taste. It’s anyone’s guess how long and how far the DEAPS missionary effort to the remaining parts of the world that have not overdosed on its lit can be sustained, but Yamaha, S&S, and the smaller players will pay their marketing people to reckon the answer.

Maybe:

1. Drawing a parallel between photography and pianos may not hold up. One could just have easily said, "now that artists have computers, they won't be using pencils, oils or acrylics anymore - they'll do graphics on the screen."

2. Moore's Law isn't a law of physics or mathematics, but a statement of an observation of a trend that started about 1965. Exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely except in the world of mathematics.

Want more proof?

http://news.techworld.com/operating-systems/3477/moores-law-is-dead-says-gordon-moore/

Glenn

Perhaps you missed my point, that one of the main complaints is a piano going out of tune, where this is something that people try to duplicate in DPs post-production or with different tuning methods in piano software. Either this slight "being out of tuneness" is desirable or it is not. Either it detracts from the acoustic piano sound or it adds to it.

My pianos generally keep their tune quite well as long as the temperature and humidity remains the same. There aren't usually one or two notes that go out of tune, as well, but the notes in the extreme ranges, so the tuning is usually in clusters of notes. This is quite different from one note standing out.

Also, if a piano is not regulated, then the feel and sound of one note will be off. This is a maintenance thing that you should ask your piano tech about.

Even mastery may be available to the DP player.

What if I programmed one key press to produce a blazingly fast two octave scale? Or chords that my fingers couldn't reach? In real time, while my other fingers were adding whatever my creative mind came up with?

Cheating? Or composing? The organist can change manuals instantly, registrations almost as fast. The surface hasn't even been scratched for the DP.

Some people actually love this music for what it means to them. It's not a status symbol or high-brow at all. This is a stereotype that perhaps has existed in some people, but it is wrong to assume everyone in this field is that way. If you knew me and what I taught, you'd never say I was high-brow or snobbish, elitist, whatever you wish to call classical music. This used to be the "popular" music of the day. Opera singers were the 19th century version of rock stars. It does sound a bit like you are looking down your nose at classical musicians.

Some classical literature is hard to play. Some of it is worth the effort, and some not, IMO. But isn't that up to the individual to decide what they like and don't like? And certainly there are varying degrees of being able to play well. I am not the most accurate pianist in the world, and I don't wish to be. I prefer to play musically, and so I don't spend excessive amounts of time on details that are not a means of being expressive. I don't believe in slavish adherence to the written notation.

So basically anyone who likes classical music doesn't know how to be creative, doesn't want to be creative, and wishes to squash creativity in others? Perhaps you've had a bad experience, and I know there are those out there who do not want people to be creative. However, I do wish you wouldn't put us all into one category. There are certainly those who encourage creativity in playing classical music, just as there are control freaks in other genres (I've met them so I know they exist). And what is wrong with the church musician or those who play in community groups or just play for their own pleasure? They may not be "wanna bees" if they are doing what they love already.

Credentials mean nothing if you can't move people with your music, period. Who cares if you have a degree and studied with so-and-so if you play like a mechanical doll? Again, I know this exists, but it is not the case with everyone who loves classical music. The written page is just a map, not a picture of the entire scene. Again, I know many pianists who at least try to get beyond the page, seeing it only as a means of getting to the music. What one does beyond that is a matter of taste. The idea that a person's pedigree means more than making music is only true in some circles.

However, your entire post puts classical musicians in a bad light as non creative, comparable to painting by numbers or being in the military. Your assertion of "it's all good!" is belied by the content of your post.

I'm just amazed at how condescending you are toward other people's love of music that does not suit your own. I don't love new age, rock, jazz, pop, world, etc. genres for myself to play, but I can appreciate them as an artform. I even choose to listen to some of it on my own. Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, and so if you hate classical that's fine. But please avoid from drawing such broad strokes of every classical musician in your apparent negative exposure to the genre.

I agree the film/digital camera | acoustic/DP analogy isn't the best. But regarding your analogy, I would only like to point out the fact that no one drafts on drafting tables anymore, CAD killed them all off.


True, true. But the screaming title to that article "Moore's Law is dead, says Gordon Moore" is hilariously contradicted by its own subtitle "Key predictor of IT will end sometime, reckons its progenitor" as well as by the body of the article.

All the more reason to have an open source DP so as to offload the onerous SW development costs. We have open source operating systems and SW running on just about every new piece of electronic equipment. There's open source SW for my wireless router, my HD video box, my MP3 player, my PC, etc. and it almost invariably works much better than the original SW from the manufacturer.

Some manufacturer should put some decent keys with decent computing & storage in a case and let it loose in the wild. I'm thinking Yamaha keys, a decent ARM or low end AMD processor, and a small (32 to 64 GB) flash-based hard drive. Once decent SW became available I'd snatch one (or two) up in a second.

I'm quite aware of CAD drafting (as a structural engineer, I do my own drafting), but it's not conducive to the creative process at all. I've tried "art" programs on computer with similar result.

Infinite exponential growth can only take place in mathematics. In the physical world, there are size constraints - the chips cannot keep getting smaller forever or they would vanish. In time, the straight line of Moore's "law" will curve downward and become asymptotic to a horizontal line. Which means that the "law" doesn't hold up, and thus isn't a law.

Glenn

All true. But I wonder if any of this applies to pianos anyway? DPs are not stressing the technical limits of their embedded computers. Rather, the limits are found in the way the sound signals are produced and in the way they're reproduced.

A sampled or modeled tone generator is not a hammer and string.

A speaker is not a soundboard.

Regarding Morodiene's response to turandot's post:

I've watched a couple of documentaries of classical pianists lately, one on Gould, another on Richter. I will certainly be over-generalizing here, but what strikes me is that classical pianists often seem disillusioned once they reach the top. They look down and realize that the seemingly iron-clad rules they were following are rather arbitrary, which leaves them somewhat rudderless.

Top classical pianists remind me of top chess players in that they are really really good at doing a very very narrowly focused thing. I find both fields overly hyped by the general media, highly claustrophobic, and ultimately somewhat sad for their crowned masters.

Morodienne,

I prefer classical music to any other category for listening. I was not putting down classical music in any way. However, reality is reality. Chances are that one day the romantic lit of the mid-to-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which made the modern acoustic concert grand piano the 'beast' (that many refer to it as) will take its place with the instrument employed to make it next to Gregorian chant, baroque, etc. I do not know when and exactly how that will happen. I'm just making an observation.

In terms of practice and performance, each player can make his own judgment about what genre appeals to him and suits his particular talents. As I said, it's all good even though it's personally annoying to me when some derivative classical throwaway piece by Mozart or Haydn concocted for a Duke, Duchess, or even an Emperor is considered superior based on its genre to something like Chick Corea's My Spanish Heart.

I'll stand on my post despite your bruised feelings (which I in no way intended to provoke). Classical lit requires tremendous self-discipline to achieve mastery. Mastery is judged by the ability to execute all the prescribed details. Can you dispute the fact that in classical lit virtually everything is prescribed?

Every generation produces a few acoustic players who can simultaneously honor the composer's intent to the fullest yet somehow get beyond it, Richter being an example in my mind. However, even at the highest level of concert pianists, most performances break no new ground and are mainly judged in comparison to other recorded or simply recalled performances.

A digital piano offers deviant options. I use the word 'deviant' because those button pushes lead away from a dedication to mastery to a world of exploration. I honestly believe that the resistance of successful classical method piano teachers towards students with digital instruments is more about those deviant options than it is about a lack of action quality and/or precise action control.

For recreational players, exploration and whatever creativity results from it can be more fulfilling and more fun than the fulfillment of a relative mastery of prescribed lit. In contemporary lifestyle patterns, whether you like them or not, the trend is toward expression of self, not about revering the past. For this the digital is a better fit. That said, those who aspire toward mastery of classical lit have my total respect. It's an arduous lifelong endeavor with few external rewards.

Please do not take my comments as condescending in any way. I was simply expressing my honest opinion. Each of us has a right to do that. However, I'm done here and will not post further on this because I don't want to engage in some meaningless debate with those who bruise so easily. My opinion is not what I want. It is simply what I see around me.



If you're composing, it's no more cheating than it would be to let a one-push string pad simulation fill in for the real thing while working out a composition that involves actual stringed instruments. Digital keyboards and workstations are invaluabe compositional tools, as is computer-generated notation. To avail oneself of these tools is hardly cheating.

In terms of performance, IMO it could be cheating if it's a recorded performance involving layering, editing, after effects, patching together the best parts of several takes, and push-button player shortcuts that are not disclosed in the recording notes. However, that's simply my opinion and shouldn't be taken too seriously since all these practices are standard stuff in the recording industry today.

I'd like to see an open soure DP also. A pure sampler would not be hard to implement but the samples are not easy to get and that is the part that really matters. How many people have a concert grand, an anechoic chamber and about $6,000 worth of microphones? That is a high bar to entry. The big trouble is always going to be getting the samples. OK there are studios near my house that rent time for only $50 an hour. But how to get a piano there?

Yes you could record in your living room using a Sure SM57 or hand held zoom digital recorder but the result would be hopelessly amateurish, just like those u-tube demos we see.

I just don't see a way to get or make a state of the art sample library. Even for a physical model you need the samples for development and testing.

As for the hardware, It takes more compute power than that. For example Pianoteq can't run on the Atom processor without turning off some features. They suggest using a dual core Intel chip. More sophisticated models will require more compute and DSP power. The sky is really the limit but even the high end of this range is getting cheap. By definition an open source project has the source availabel so it could be recompiled onto user's hardware, whatever that is. You would have to select a common, free Real-Time operating system.

Getting a sample library will remain the big hurdle.

I would have a hard time commenting on this whole thread except to say in all my years of being a musician, I have never met a serious Jazz or Classical player or student that would opt for a DP over a good acoustic piano UNLESS neighbor proximity would not allow for them to practice. OR when recording tracks, the DP obviously is easier and quicker to blend into the overall picture and does not require the additional purchase of high end mics and preamps not to mention the mic placement or engineering skill to get a good sound. OR when the volume level on stage gets to be loud enough where the micing of the piano within the band or ensemble can be a major problem.

There is a thread here where I've made my feelings known:
http://forums.musicplayer.com/ubbth...e_day_I_stopped_playing_digi#Post2146367

Isn't that the truth.