Castle Paradox

[Joe Man]

I'm in the market for a keyboard, primarily for practice and sequencing purposes, so I'm curious what I should look for.

As far as requirements, I'm hoping to get a full 88 key keyboard with general midi and good action. Lots of tones aren't a necessity but I suppose percussion would be pretty useful for composition. A little music stand is a plus, and pre-included songs and rhythms are not important (though a metronome is nice). Oh, and a pedal. Pitch bend is fun sometimes.
And the big important part, I don't want my girlfriend measuring it in how many Wiis I could but for the same price.

Thoughts and suggestions?
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"Everyone has 200,000 bad drawings in them, the sooner you get them out the better."
~Charles Martin Jones

Last edited by Joe Man on Fri Dec 13, 1957 1:21 am; edited 2,892 time in total

[Artimus Bena]

88 keys will up the price. Casio is probably the way to go though. They're usually cheap because the voices tend to be substandard, but you're not worried about voices. That is, if casio makes an 88 key...
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SACRE BLEU!

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[Joe Man]

hah, already have some casio crap, even a big pile of songbooks for electric keyboards (which really just means plain one-handed melody)

but tone is kind of important, just not having 255 different ones. I'd probably actually play on this one sometimes, and therefor I might accidentally hear it.
_________________
"Everyone has 200,000 bad drawings in them, the sooner you get them out the better."
~Charles Martin Jones

Last edited by Joe Man on Fri Dec 13, 1957 1:21 am; edited 2,892 time in total

[Artimus Bena]

Then the really good keyboards are yahama or korg, though you can still get some really decent casios, depending on the price range. Why not look up keyboards in musician's friend's website? They usually have some pretty good deals on equpiment.

http://www.musiciansfriend.com/?src=00633
_________________
SACRE BLEU!

|||Compositions!
|||Eldardeen Soundtrack!
|||Red Mercury!

[Bob the Hamster]

One important thing to pay attention to is that they keys support "velocity". if you press the key softly, you get a small sound. if you hit the key hard, you get a big sound. Many really cheap keyboards don't support that. The keys will always be off or on, binary-like.

[Joe Man]

I actually already mentioned that actually, lots of people call that "action."

Ooh, thanks for the link. I tend to do most of my shopping here in the real world, but I like having online references. I'll do me some browsing.
_________________
"Everyone has 200,000 bad drawings in them, the sooner you get them out the better."
~Charles Martin Jones

Last edited by Joe Man on Fri Dec 13, 1957 1:21 am; edited 2,892 time in total

[jabbercat]

Action? Velocity?

I thought it was dynamics. I usually take action to mean the phsical action of the hammer->string mechanism on a piano, but maybe thats just classical pianist in me.

My best advice is to go for a Yamaha clavinova, it's a upright piano....but it's not! Nearly always they connect to computers via USB, so they're native.
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[Setu_Firestorm]

I've never heard the term "action" for that. "Velocity" is more in terms of the MIDI interpretation of touch response, and "dynamics" are the term for the actual playing of the dynamics. So, "velocity" is in reference to MIDI, Jabber.

Korg and Roland are pretty much the best name in synthesizers, but even then if you want something of really good quality, you've got to fork up quite a bit of money for it.
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