Electric Piano 61 Keys

[Latisha Gervase]

Somekeyboards come with what are called "touch-sensitive" keys, where the force by which you press the key changes the resulting volume. Thus if you press the key lightly, you play a quiet volume, but more forceful pressing results in a louder volume.

Many electric keyboards are velocity-sensitive. They keys have two contacts; one closes early during the stroke, and another when the key is full way down. The time gap between these two events depends on how strong (actually how fast) do you press, and controls the loudness.

The ability to control the dynamics also depends on how "heavy" the keys are. If the keys are too easy to press, it may be very difficult to press them faster or slower, you always just get the same. Even if you master somehow, the skill is not transferable to the acoustic piano and may even bind to some specific model of the electric keyboard.

You need a "fully weighted keyboard" to get something comparable to the piano keyboard. Not all of these keyboards are very expensive; cheaper versions cost only hundreds when any piano normally costs thousands.

Very high end models may even have part of the actual piano mechanism (while no strings), aiming for the really precise imitation, but approach a piano in price and more make sense only if you need a silent instrument.

Senior staff writer Brent Butterworth is known as an audio journalist, but he is also an accomplished musician who has played double bass with jazz, rock, and folk groups in New York City and Los Angeles, recorded an album with his own jazz group, Take2, hosted regular jam sessions for years, and worked with innumerable keyboard players. He also owns two digital pianos.

Previous versions of this guide were written by John Higgins, who holds a Bachelor of Music degree with an audio-production and piano focus from Ithaca College, as well as a Master of Music in keyboard collaborative arts from the University of Southern California. John has worked as a professional music director, performed in concert halls and on nightclub stages, and taught music at a private Los Angeles middle and high school.

Our testing panels have included two pro pianists. Liz Kinnon has performed with artists such as Dizzy Gillespie and Andy Williams, worked as an orchestrator on the animated shows Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, and Histeria, and currently teaches jazz piano at the Colburn School in Los Angeles. Phil Metzler is a lifelong musician who plays keyboards (and occasionally trumpet) in the pop/rock band Just Off Turner, which has released five studio albums. He also composes music in his home studio in Los Angeles.

Most digital pianos include a simple sustain pedal, which lets the notes ring out, but it is usually lightweight and prone to flopping over and getting kicked around the floor. Even if your piano comes with a pedal, we strongly recommend upgrading to a sturdier, weighted pedal right away. Some digital pianos allow an upgrade to a three-pedal module, which adds the soft and sostenuto pedals found on an acoustic piano; we recommend getting one of these if your piano is compatible.

The FP-10 is feature-packed and supports Bluetooth. It offers many special features, such as a metronome, action adjustment, and the ability to split the keyboard in two so that middle C is in the middle of each half of the keyboard, allowing a teacher and a student to play together on the same piano.

The physical controls leave much to be desired. The FP-10 lacks a digital display, and making adjustments manually is less intuitive on this piano than it is on our runner-up pick, the Casio CDP-S160.

We also liked the two electric-piano sounds. Brent particularly liked the B3 organ sound, and John thought the rotary-speaker sound effect added to the realism. However, the harpsichord and string sounds had a sterile and decidedly digital quality. The internal speakers play loud enough for a small, acoustic jam session.

You can return to the grand-piano sound with a single press of the function button, and the keyboard also has a dedicated button for starting and stopping the record feature. The volume dial feels firm and moves smoothly.

The keyboard also has a metronome that lets you adjust the tempo up and down, or you can set a specific tempo between 20 and 255 beats per minute. A duet function allows the CDP-S160 to split into two sides so that a student and teacher can sit at the keyboard together, with each side covering the same range of notes.

The CDP-S160 comes with a flimsy sustain pedal, which we recommend replacing with a heavier, sturdier pedal. The optional Casio SP-34 three-pedal add-on gives you the additional soft and sostenuto pedals found on an acoustic piano, and we recommend upgrading to it at some point.

The Alesis Recital Pro is by far the easiest to use of the digital pianos we tested, which may be especially important for beginners. Despite being the least expensive of our picks, it sounds good, plays reasonably well, and has the essential features we like to see.

The sound effects, on the other hand, are great, and the Recital Pro has a lot of them: eight different reverbs, eight choruses, and three modulation effects (tremolo, vibrato, and rotary speaker). The keyboard keeps your effect settings for each of the 12 sounds in memory, so it restores them when you choose that sound again or turn the keyboard off and then on. These effects are likely to be less important and useful for a beginner, but they might appeal to someone looking for an inexpensive performance piano.

Ease of use is its strongest asset. You can handle all instrument selection through six buttons on the console (two sounds per button). Buttons for modulation, chorus, and reverb effects are provided, and the piano has a digital display that shows all the settings and parameters.

Another feature that we found useful is the metronome, which you can easily access and adjust through the digital display and scroll wheel. Like our top picks, the CDP-S360 allows you to split the keyboard so that a teacher and a student can play together, or so that a single pianist can access two different sounds (or even two sounds at once in the upper register). The piano-control function of the Music Space app makes this feature easy to configure.

This piano plays just like the CDP-S160. The CDP-S360 uses the same scaled hammer action, and it has the same unusual but nice key texture. In a side-by-side comparison, the two keyboards felt the same.

Like most budget digital pianos, the CDP-S360 comes with a lightweight sustain pedal that tends to wander around on the floor. We strongly recommend replacing it with a heavier, sturdier pedal, or with the optional Casio SP-34 three-pedal add-on, which gives you the additional soft and sostenuto pedals found on an acoustic piano.

Although the Artesia PA-88H is a decent keyboard, nothing about it stood out enough for us to rank it above any of our picks. Brent owns one, but he finds that most of the pianists in his jam sessions greatly prefer his Yamaha P-45.

We considered the Roland Go:Piano88 as a possible substitute for our budget pick, the Alesis Recital Pro. It has nice-sounding samples, but it lacks weighted keys, which are important for beginners to learn on so that the transition to an acoustic piano is easier.

Brent Butterworth is a senior staff writer covering audio and musical instruments at Wirecutter. Since 1989, he has served as an editor or writer on audio-focused websites and magazines such as Home Theater, Sound & Vision, and SoundStage. He regularly gigs on double bass with various jazz groups, and his self-produced album Take2 rose as high as number three on the Roots Music Report jazz album chart.

We hired a hand model to show you how we can turn up and down the volume (lord those knuckles) so you can see the interface better. Also, the pedals (which you can see below) are great and feel just like a normal piano IMHO.

Yes! My nieces and nephew are all very good for their ages, 9, 11, 14. They live in a downtown area where people walk by a lot. Every time they have a family yard sale tons of people comment on how much they enjoy hearing the piano while passing by. I loved hearing them play while I was visiting, plus my sister is super diligent about them practicing and wow does it show.

Also, this was a bit stressful to read about all of your issues with sounds. Have you tried meditation? Just seems like you are harboring a lot of anxiety and neuroses (be nicer to yourself, your knuckles are totally normal looking!) Music is joyful, volume up!

This tiny minority that sees the need to bash Emily and her choices every post is starting to really just get abusive. The team should just delete these posts. No one should be subjected to abuse like this every day.

I am also super sensitive to noises! Everywhere. I was at Nordstrom Rack a few weeks ago and they were blasting music. But like, really bad music. I had to pop in my ear plugs. And I could still hear said bad music.

My grandma bought me an electric piano when I was 10. I loved learning and playing on it as a kid. I especially loved using headphones as I was learning a piece so no one had to hear my mistakes. Although it is not as beautiful as yours, I still have it and still play it and it still sounds amazing (no tuning required). I think its a great choice!

The Rhodes piano (also known as the Fender Rhodes piano) is an electric piano invented by Harold Rhodes, which became popular in the 1970s. Like a conventional piano, the Rhodes generates sound with keys and hammers, but instead of strings, the hammers strike thin metal tines, which vibrate next to an electromagnetic pickup. The signal is then sent through a cable to an external keyboard amplifier and speaker.

The instrument evolved from Rhodes's attempt to manufacture pianos while teaching recovering soldiers during World War II. Development continued after the war and into the following decade. In 1959, Fender began marketing the Piano Bass, a cut-down version; the full-size instrument did not appear until after Fender's sale to CBS in 1965. CBS oversaw mass production of the Rhodes piano in the 1970s, and it was used extensively through the decade, particularly in jazz, pop, and soul music. It was less used in the 1980s because of competition with polyphonic and digital synthesizers such as the Yamaha DX7 and an inconsistent quality control caused by cost-cutting.

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