So I have a Yamaha grand at my parent's house, and I moved -and the last few months I have been practicing on my Roland FP-7F keyboard.

For a digital, it's pretty good - the touch is comfortable and the sound is nice. But I got kind of shocked when I went to play my Yamaha grand after a long time of not playing it.

The keys felt really heavy, and my playing, which was fine on the FP-7F, was a bit hindered by not playing the grand - and was a bit choppier at first until I got re-used to the keys again.

Is this something worrisome? The touch of the grand piano really felt like another thing entirely, the weight and response have nothing to do with how the Roland responds touch wise.

I wonder if heavy-duty practice on a digital, even one as good as the Roland, can be detrimental to playing on an actual grand.

Sure - you can adapt to it, but there is no denying a difference in the touch.

The difference is mass...inertia. Any DP can simulate the up and down weight of a piano which is an issue of friction and balance. The reason better DP's are still so heavy is because they have to be to simulate reasonable. The weight doesn't improve the sound....

A real action is a long linkage and the total mass of each key, repetition, hammer and shank is probably double (or more) that of PHAIII in the FP-7F.

That said, if you want to be adaptable, you have to practice adapting to. If you only played on your Yamaha and then went to another nice but different acoustic piano, you would also have to adapt. My advice is play as many good pianos (real and digital) as you can as often as you can. (seems obvious, doesn't it )

No. There's always an adjustment going from one piano to another but for a normal player the benefits of additional practice and the chance to play lots of different actions is a good thing.

I suppose if you were a high-level concert pianist who always played on a certain action you might not want to have to adjust, but that's an unusual circumstance.

I play on a Roland with PHA-III action at home, and regularly play on acoustic grands and uprights elsewhere, though for a long time (until I bought my DP) I just played whatever piano (in whatever condition) I could get access to. There really is an unbelievable range of keyweights and actions out there, especially amoung acoustics, and my opinion is that all serious pianists should be able to adapt to anything (within reasonable limits....).

I've played on ultralight, sloppy actions on pianos of a certain vintage, and ultra-stiff and uneven ones on poorly maintained pianos. DPs tend to be more consistent, but frankly I find it easy to transition from my DP to an acoustic grand (Yamaha or otherwise) - easier in many respects than to transition from one brand of acoustic to another, or an old piano to a new one.

I agree with the posters above who responded to CrashTest. Wisdom borne of wide experience.

That is true - many pianos do have greatly varying actions even amongst grand pianos.

My only fear was that this isn't just a question of "adapting", it is a question of a digital piano vs adapting on an acoustic. I am always fearful that some detriment to technique can happen if extensive practice is done on a digital vs an acoustic.

I can give you my own personal experience - my technique had been somewhat rough-and-ready from when I left the security of university life (and easy access to their well-tuned Yamaha uprights in their practice rooms), simply because my practicing went by the wayside, and I just had to play on anything I could get my hands on. It was mostly fast runs and intricate passagework that suffered - they lost their evenness; my octave and chordal technique didn't deteriorate much.

Then I bought my DP in 2010 and was able to concentrate on practising properly, at any time I wanted to (via headphones). I stopped going to churches and assembly halls and piano showrooms (and cruise ships and stately homes and shopping malls ) etc where I used to practise sporadically on the acoustic pianos there. It wasn't till several months later that I thought I'd try playing on a real piano again to see what I've been missing.....and I found I could now do on the acoustics exactly what I'd worked on when practising on my DP. My fast runs were now faster - and smooth ; thirds were no longer fudged, and my octaves were even faster and cleaner. In other words, I had no problems at all switching (back) to acoustics and carrying over what I'd practised on my DP. Since then I've stopped being a hermit again and delighted in visiting showrooms and concert halls to play on well-tuned and regulated acoustics - and even DPs (now that I've lost my previous contempt for them ). But I longer wish to play on out-of-tune pianos with stuck/missing keys....

Bennevis

Thanks your sharing an experience . Any chance of revealing which DP you were playing on ? A lot of us are probably thinking of using a DP as a practice instrument.

Anders, I believe Bennevis owns a V-Piano.

James
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I had my first music lesson today. Teacher has two acoustic pianos in her office: a Yamaha grand piano and a Yamaha vertical piano. I played on both of them.

I feel a bit deflated realising just how far off the mark my Yamaha CLP 430 is. The acoustic Yamahas in teacher's office both felt and sounded so much better.

This is mere speculation, but wouldn't the difference between a good modern practice instrument - a Yamaha U3 upright, say - and a piano from the late 18th or early 19th century be far more profound in various ways, than the difference between an similar acoustic piano and a good quality Yamaha, Kawai, Roland or Casio digital.

But that didn't seem to hamper the technique of Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Schumann or the 100s of thousands of pianists who played their works during that period.

....or maybe it DID hamper them. But they had neither knowledge nor solution so they just got on with it.

'Technique' (or the ability to play the piano) is partly the ability to move, unobtrusively between different types of instrument.

I experienced the same thing last night. I spent a fair amount of time playing my CP5 trying to record something and after several hours I went back to my N3 and I really felt the difference.

I don't normally spend hours on the CP5 and I was truly made aware of the differences between a digital action, a light one at that, and a grand piano action.

I vividly remember my Grade 1 piano exam (aged 10 3/4 ): I played on a grand for the first time, with keyweights much heavier (and distinctly 'notchy' feel) than the Yamaha console-sized upright I've been practising on at home (my teacher had a slightly bigger Yamaha upright, with only slightly heavier keys). It was a shock to realize that pianos could be so different.......

Really? What makes you say that James?

I have to say that I do find that Yamaha's non-AvantGrand DPs, because of their lack of the 'notch' as the key is depressed, feels rather more obviously 'different' and lighter than the higher-end Roland and Kawai DPs, especially when playing soft, slow music.

I've stated this more than once, the action of the CP300 was ideal for a stage piano. Why Yamaha switched to a lighter action for the CP5, I don't know.

The opposite is true. Yamaha GH and GH3 are patently the heaviest DP actions, subjectively heavier and in fact considerably heavier than Roland PHA-II/III and Kawai RM3/RH actions.

Which may explain the heavy action of the Avant Grand. Perhaps it is the Yamaha digital piano philosophy at work.

I actually really like the CP5 action and find it to be a superb balance between piano and EP playing. Since we can all agree that even the best DP actions don't feel or connect the way a good AP action does, finding a good action that works well for a variety of situations and sounds is my top priority. The CP5 is great compromise.

Well my N3 is weighted at more or less exactly 50g on middle C. My MP10 is about 56g. If I remember correctly when I measured my old CP33 it was well over 60g at middle C and over 70g in the lowest notes - much heavier than all the others.

And my N3 feels way heavier to play than my MP10 . . . I think there is more to this than just the measure of weights.

Static weight is measuring how much mass to gently sink the key. It doesn't measure how much the key resists your effort to push it down.

That resistance to your input is Dynamic Weight. This one can't be measured by putting weights on the keys to see how much it takes to push it down. The harder you hit, the more the key resists.

I rarely see discussions about this here. And this dynamic vs static weight thing, I bet, is at the very heart of all the "XXX is lighter than NNN!" discussions.

If I'm playing forte and beyond, my fingers definitely tell me it's a heavier effort than if I'm playing the very same piece on the same keyboard softly.

This goes for any piano-like mechanism (DP, AP, mechanical tracker organ) that actually lifts or moves a load. I don't think it'll apply to spring-loaded keys. They don't have to overcome the inertia of a hammer.

Yeah we really need a standardized way of measuring dynamic weight. It would be so nice if for every piano we discuss here we had three reliable measurements: up, down, and dynamic weight. Then we could actually say something about the heavier and lighter actions available without having someone else completely disagree about which is the heavier.

I've never heard of Dynamic Weight, but it makes sense.

A quick google search produced this article: http://www.bluebookofpianos.com/bbb.html

I think we're all thinking too hard about this. I'd be willing to guess most of the players here on the DP forums don't have to worry about going back and forth between DPs and APs, therefore to contiuously compare how authentic a DP action feels to a real acoustic action is a moot point, or ought to be. DP actions now days are far superior to many unkept AP actions and most importantly allow for very expressive AP playing. If you're in a situation where you are pursuing a career in a professional performance level of piano playing and don't have the space or money to get an AP, the top end digitals offer enough to get you a solid foundation of technique. It seems chasing down a DP with an action that will feel just like an AP is one in vain. There's a lot more to APs than just the sound or feel of the action. This of course is my 2 cents, but I was chasing down a DP for years that felt like an AP, and after thousands spent, even on the AvantGrand, and none of them give me a like-for-like experience to playing on a good AP. Like I said, there's quite a bit more to APs than the action or sound. There's a complex connection of the two that DPs haven't offered yet.

Sorry for the rant/ramble.

I for one play DP and acoustic on a regular basis . . .

Absolutely. Being an amateur going back and forth between my upright (a good one) and DPs almost every day what's annoying me with the DPs (P155 and a NE3HP) is not the action in itself but the sounds and the *connection* with the action. Even when my upright is a bit out of tune it's just so much richer and more expressive than even the best Nord sample I can run on my Electro.

However, there are things I can do with the keys of my piano that I simply can't on any of the plastic keybeds. It has to do with timing, dynamic expression, and bodily involvement, but I can't put my finger on it.

Edit: On the other hand I can carry the Nord with me and have a lot of fun at times and in places where I otherwise would not be able to make music at all

Yeah, dynamic weight has only to do with the moment of rotational inertia, while up and down weight have to do with how much more weight is on the front of the key than the back.

Really the former is probably more important as far as fatigue and injury are concerned. Excessive down weight without too much inertia just makes a keyboard feel more crisp.

I see what you did there...?

Me too. I practice my stuff through headphones on my DP, then reward myself by playing it masterfully on my AP which sits immediately adjacent!

I've tried a lot of digital pianos, and played on a lot of very nice grands before. I just bought an FP-7F. What I can say is, I'm getting sick of the fake touch on the FP-7F, but it's honestly as good as it gets for a non-grand piano action, IMO. Digital pianos do not have a repetition/escapement mechanism, they only have a weight which doesn't come off the key, and thus won't feel anything like a real piano.

The most important thing IMO if you don't have access to a grand piano for practicing is sensitivity, as it lets you keep your ability to fine tune the sound as you play. Upright pianos found in typical crappy practice rooms don't cut it in that department, and a digital piano will be much better. Every piano has different touch anyways, so expect to have to adjust.

I know what you mean by the grand piano feeling heavier, I think it's that the grand action has varying mechanical advantage as the key travels down, so you are able to impart a lot more velocity to the hammer than you are able to on a digital. But compared to an upright which has spring loaded hammers, I'd argue the digital is better because at least there's always that solid feel to it.

trigalg693,

this fake touch you are referring to is particular to the fp7f or to all DPs being the fp7f the 'least' fakeish?

All DPs that I've ever played feel fake, but the Roland PHA-III actions feel the least fake to me, by a small margin. They still feel very fake though.

All compact DP actions are more or less mechanically the same, besides Rhodes and the expensive Yamahas with the full real piano action in them. The thing that sets the Rolands apart IMO is they respond more accurately than anything else I've tried, so the fake feeling action is more tolerable.

trigalg693, what about the Kawai actions, specifically wooden-key actions like 'RM3 Grand'?

I actually haven't tried the RM3, so maybe I should stop making blanket statements...but I tried the AWA pro whatever thing that preceded the RM3, and it had the same problem of feeling wrong when the key was close to bottoming out. The AWA felt slightly "softer" than the Roland when it hit the felt stops when bottoming out which I liked a lot though. The hard thump when the key bottoms out on the Roland is pretty annoying.

My local store sold the last MP10 before I got a chance to try it. However I did look at pictures of the RM3 action and well, I don't think it can address my main complaint about digital pianos since it, because it is fundamentally the same as other actions mechanically.

At least for me, the MP6 didn't give me the right tone for the effort I was giving the key compared to the FP-7F. The FP-7F is calibrated a little closer to a real piano IMO, but maybe that's just me.

I wonder if you're perhaps confusing the 'RH' and 'RM3 Grand' keyboard actions? I agree that the plastic-key 'RH' action looks very similar to most other digital piano actions, however to my eyes the wooden-key 'RM3 Grand' action is quite different.

'RH' action (plastic keys):


'RM3 Grand' action (wooden keys):


Kind regards,
James
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It sounds like you are looking for true escapement. If so, your options are AvantGrands and that's it. Digital actions do not have true letoff/escapement so you don't get the difference between upweight and downweight characteristic of acoustics. I suppose that's what makes the bottom of the stroke feel real to you. If you think about it, though, does that actually help you play? Is it really a necessary part of a good action?

I suppose feeling real means feeling more and more like an acoustic, whether the features being included actually aid in playing or not. As long as digital actions include the features that are actually helpful in an acoustic action, I'm happy.

I totally understand they are different, but the way the mass that is emulating the hammer behaves is the same, the RM3 just has the hammer flipped around and placed on the other side of the pivot. The advantage an RM3 has would be the key pivot points are correct, but that doesn't make the hammer behave more like it should.

And gvfarns, yes I want true escapement, but realized that you can't have something that is relatively cheap, that you can move around by yourself, and have a real action in it. I remember helping a piano technician lift the action out of my piano at home, the action alone weighed more than my FP-7F.

I don't think there's any dispute that a real action helps playing, because a true action is what behaves intuitively and naturally in its response to our fingers.