PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Digital Piano recommendaton?

I would go with something synthesizer based because with a Rhodes or a Wurly you only have that one sound available. The EP 30, as it has aged and started to vanish from the landscape (They ARE from 1974, after all!) is likely to be overpriced because they are called "legacy" (I hate that word. They are OLD, not legacy.) Newer Roland pianos will treat you better as sound reproduction technology has improved so much in the 50 years since the RD 30 came out. And you won't have to pay "legacy" prices.

A lot depends on your application. Do you want a "piano" piano as if you had an upright in your living room or do you want the bells and whistles of a workstation, hundreds of sounds that come in a synth that also does piano well, etc... I have an old Kurzweil KP2500x (that weighs 72 pounds and is too big and heavy for anything but a platform stand) that sounds great, yet I also have a Nord Electro4 that not only has solid pianos but the best Hammond sounds short of lugging a 600 pound Hammond around. And the Roland FA-06 I just bought used for $800 at the Sweetwater campus in Fort Wayne is also great. The Roland though is a workstation with a lot of sequencer power, an assignable 16 button pad where you can create a "song set" of any 16 sounds of the hundreds of them and call them up on the fly from the keypad (I use that a lot), an SD card slot that you can bring songs into the board, load them into RAM and play them while you play along live...

Application should really be your first consideration. If you want that classic unique Rhodes sound, buy the Rhodes. The same for the unique Wurly sound. Workstation vs just a sound source. Remember that with a complex keyboard will come a large learning curve. If you just want to play piano with piano feel, Roland's velocity sensitivity is very lifelike. As I like to say, horses for courses.

Just remember that old doesn't mean good OR bad. I still have 2 Ensoniq keyboards (EQS-1 and EPS 16+ sampler) from the 80s that are great and I will likely keep them until I die. I don't even really play anymore. Yet I have 8 keyboards and 6 modular synths. I really kind of just buy them because I can. LOL!

Nor necessarily low-cost.

Casio digital pianos are well respected at the lower cost end.

Yamaha and Kawai both make their own keybeds and both make their own quality acoustic pianos ... the skills transfer.

I believe Roland, Nord and Korg all buy in someone else's keybeds (mostly Fatar, I think, though Nord's grans uses a Kawai).

Just about every recent piano has a USB-MIDI interface. All weighted keyboards are heavy-ish ... if you're planning on moving it ofen, check the weight.

The usual advice is to try before you buy, but sometimes that's easier said then done.

FWIW, I use a Kawai MP6 stage piano, now superceded by the MP7 and MP7SE. I usually use the built-in sounds, but sometimes PianoTeq.

My brother chose Roland from which he preferred the sound. I prefer the Kawai's keys. YMMV.

Thoughts on how you plan to use it will help people narrow things down.

I've got a Casio Privia PX-S3000 (as well as a Roland RD-1000 and a Yamaha C5 Grand, but that's another story)

The PX-S3000 (might be PX-S3100 now) is very portable and has a full 88 key weighted action. It has 700 tones available (I generally only use Grand Piano, but there are Electric Pianos, Vibes, and many more).

It's noted to be the "Slimmest hammer-action digital piano in the world". Very portable, very good, and quite affordable considering what you get.

Just a note that this is reviving a thread that was five years old. I’m assuming Notes bought a keyboard long ago. If there is interest in this topic, it might be appropriate to start a new thread, along the lines of What Keyboard Would You Buy Now.

In my case as a winds player, I’ll never be able to tell a difference, but I would hope that Gary Curran would see the thread and weigh in.

This was revived by a newer user who may have thought this was the best way to ask the question. There's nothing "wrong" with this, but a fresh thread may have been a better option.