Buying a Digital Keyboard for Your Home
- In This Quick Guide:
- The Pros and Cons of a Digital Keyboard
- Making Sense of the Bells and Whistles
- New or Used?
Digital keyboards are popular for the home because of their potent combination of features and cost-efficiency. The main problem when shopping for a home keyboard is that there are so darn many of them. Each manufacturer has several new models at all times, and there is a bustling used-instrument marketplace at the same time. In this guide we will look at the main considerations to keep in mind as you browse.
The Pros and Cons of a Digital Keyboard
Simply put, you get a lot of bang for your buck with a digital keyboard:
- a five-octave keyboard, large enough to learn on and to play simple keyboard arrangements
- several sound selections
- auto-accompaniment features that make the keyboard sound like a one-person band
- built-in speakers
- battery power
- a light, portable package that you can pick up and carry into the next room or put in an airplane luggage compartment
All these basic features come to you at a price that shames most digital pianos, and doesn’t even appear on the radar screen of somebody shopping for a real piano.
The only downside to the home keyboard marketplace is sound quality: home keyboards just don’t sound as rich or sonorous as professional keyboards or digital pianos. Still, they are great to learn on, and you can always upgrade later if you (or your kids) get serious about playing.
Making Sense of the Bells and Whistles
First and foremost when shopping for a home keyboard, you must feel comfortable with the controls. If you’re new to electronic keyboards, viewing all the buttons and dials coherently may seem like too much to ask for. Here’s how to handle the techno-intimidation:
- The first key is to take your time when shopping. Don’t be rushed into any purchase.
- Find salespeople who can explain what all the buttons do.
- Ask the salesperson to get the owner’s manual for the display unit, so you can simulate the learning experience you’ll have at home if you buy that instrument.
By spending some time with a possible purchase in the store, you can get familiar (and possibly comfortable) enough with all the controls to determine if the keyboard is configured in a friendly fashion. Here are some questions to ask yourself as you fiddle with any home keyboard in a store:
- Is the keyboard touch sensitive? Touch sensitivity means that if you play a key softly, it makes a soft note, and striking a key hard results in a loud note. Keyboards that lack touch sensitivity make the same volume no matter how you play the keyboard, though even they are equipped with a volume control that affects all the notes equally. You can learn the basics of music and music notation on a non-sensitive keyboard, but it’s impossible to play musically when the notes don’t get louder and softer according to your playing touch.
- Is the screen easy to read, and large enough to spell out clearly what functions you’re accessing? Small screens often use cryptic abbreviations for various functions and features—if you can decipher them, you earn an honored place in the Secret Service’s cryptography division. The larger screens inform you clearly what sound you’re playing, what auto-accompaniment style is currently in use, and which sequencer track is recording or playing.
- Do you like the keyboard’s sounds? In most cases, you have plenty of sounds to choose from, possibly a hundred or more. Don’t expect the quality of a symphony orchestra, but you should at least feel that the keyboard’s basic tonal quality won’t drive you crazy during extended use.
- Also, check out the auto-accompaniment styles for an indication of the on-board sounds. The single sound that probably gets the most use is the built-in piano sound, which may not sound the slightest bit like a piano.
- Does the auto-accompaniment provide the kinds of styles you like? If you’re a rock ’n’ roll type, and the on-board styles feature waltzes and military marches, you’re likely to suffer a pang or two of disappointment. Most keyboards have a broad range of styles, aiming to please everyone a little bit. Pick out the styles you figure using most heavily, and see if you like the way they sound.
- Does the auto-accompaniment provide enough flexibility? One specific question you should ask about the auto-accompaniment is whether you can change the tempo easily. Making the styles faster and slower is crucial to their usefulness. Then, find out whether you can change the key of the style. Check out whether you can add and subtract instruments from the style while it’s playing—it’s handy and fun to reduce the style to drums alone while it’s playing, then add bass, chords, and other musical elements as the style continues playing.
Finally, make sure there are left-hand style controls. The left hand is used to determine the chords played by the style arrangement, and better keyboards give you three ways of doing so: full-chord playing, two-finger chords, and one-finger bass lines. Full-chord playing is for people who know chords well and can play them on the fly. Two-finger playing is a kind of chord shorthand that’s easier to play, but still requires a knowledge of chords. One-finger playing reduces the auto-accompaniment to either a bass line or all major chords, and is the least useful way of controlling a style’s harmony.
Many home keyboards feature built-in demonstration songs that salespeople use to show off the instrument in its best light. In addition to the demos, other songs may be included for playing at your leisure. These songs are different from the auto-accompaniment styles, which are meant to be used as an accompaniment to your playing.
New or Used?
It’s not surprising that a large and dynamic used marketplace has developed for keyboards. Hobbyists and professionals alike tend to shed last year’s model for the newest high-tech instrument, and all those older keyboards must exist somewhere. That “somewhere” is classified ads in newspapers all over the world, as well as music stores that stock pre-owned instruments.
As pre-owned purchases go, music keyboards are one of the safest items to buy. Whenever you’re buying used electronic equipment, the main risk lies with devices that have delicate moving parts. Just about the only moving parts in a music keyboard are the keys themselves, and they are hardly delicate. You could hit most keyboards with a hammer and the keys would still work fine.
If you are dabbling with the idea of buying a used keyboard, here are some important considerations to keep in mind:
- The warranty, or lack thereof. Although used keyboards are relatively safe purchases, things can definitely go wrong with keyboards sometimes. These instruments are reliably built, but when one stops working, you may want to have warranty protection.
- The shininess, or lack thereof. You don’t have to be a compulsive consumer to appreciate the new-product shine on a factory-fresh keyboard. Used instruments sometimes show signs of wear on the keys and dials.
- The newness, or lack thereof. Music keyboard technology is constantly evolving. So are the designs in which that technology is packaged. Buying a model that’s one, two, or three years old may save you some bucks, but it deprives you of whatever new features have become standard in the interim. Let’s be honest. What are these new features worth? The truth is, there haven’t been many ground-breaking advances in home keyboards in the last few years. For one thing, a keyboard is still a keyboard, with the same arrangement of black and white keys that has held forth for centuries. If your goal is to learn basic keyboard technique, it really doesn’t matter what fancy gizmos surround the basic keyboard.
Digital keyboards are one of the best investments you can make, whether you want to just play for fun or are starting your child on the piano-playing path. Have fun, and happy playing!
From The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing Piano, Third Edition, by Brad Hill
