Friday, January 05, 2007

The Day Has Come When I Drool Over A Digital Piano

My current "thing I just gotta have right this second" is this Yamaha YPG-625 Digital Grand Piano. I'm saving up for it.

I saw the keyboard when I was browsing my local Guitar Center, and really enjoyed playing what little snippets of pieces I remember on it. The keys feel "right" to me, which is, to me, the must-have feature on a digital piano.

I remember when digital pianos started to become the big fad around 6 or 7 years ago (maybe even before that), and these sales people would expect you to justify paying between $2,000 and $5,000 for a digital piano. To me, there is nothing that can replicate the experience of playing a real, wood & steel piano wire piano. I would get so disgusted with those salespeople because they didn't understand that; they would try to sell you the idea that a digital piano was better than a "real" piano because you wouldn't have to ever tune it, and that people couldn't tell by sound which was a real piano and which was a digital.

Right now it's not logically feasible for me to move my Samick upright from my parents' home to my apartment. That's part of the reason I want to buy this Yamaha. I've been out of practice so long and some days when I get home from work I just want to sit down and play something.

Here is a list of what I eventually want to be able to play (some of the music I can play with the sheet music, other pieces are new to me):
  • Mozart's Sonata No. 11 in A Major (KV 331) - I'd like to eventually play all three parts.
  • Mozart's Turkish March
  • Rachmaninoff's Prelude Op. 23 No. 5 - my old piano instructor had me learn the first part of this, under the title "The District Attorney"
  • Chopin's Nocturne in C Sharp Minor (posthumous) - if I could get this to sound like pearls I can give up piano playing
  • Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata; I know how to play the first part, with the sheet music. I want to get better.
  • Beethoven's Fur Elise - I can play the first part of this from memory
  • Beethoven's Rage Over A Lost Penny
  • Several of Bach's Minuets
  • Shubert's Military March

And some pop pieces:
  • In Dreams (From Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring)
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation Theme (you won't believe how long it took me to find the sheet music for this)

I used to like playing more pop, and less classical, but I must be getting older. Or have a greater appreciation for truer gems.

1 comment:

don said...

Go For it! You deserve it.

I can play the first part of the Moonlight Sonata from memory. and I remember some of Hyden's Gypsy Rondo. But that's about all I remember.

Yamaha made an "electric grand" years ago that is a really cool instrument. It even looks like a baby grand. I'm sure you've seen one on TV at some point. I think it does strike strings. I suspect one of those would cost a couple of thousand or more now however if you could find one and it would need some kind of amplifier.

I have an old Fender Rhodes suit case piano (somewhere in my basement) I don't know what possesed me to buy it. I bought it for $400 several years ago when I saw it in a music store and didn't have a piano, and was living in an apartment. I didn't want one of those keyboards back then as they weren't so good.

It has a regular piano key and hammer action. It's almost the size of a regular spinet piano. It plays perfect and has a really nice touch. (some of them did not, so this is a good on as they go.) They made a few different versions. Mine is a 73. It has 73 keys. Some of them had the regular 88 keys. It's just a cool old thing. I need to get it back out and goof around with it. I forgot I even had it!