Digital Pianos Vs. Upright Pianos

Hi I'm Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com and VirtualSheetMusic.com, and today the question is are you better off with a good quality digital piano versus an upright piano? Well, there's a lot to be considered here. Digitals after all have consistency, they're always perfectly in tune. Plus you can adjust the volume, even practice with headphones. You can connect to your computer for enhanced learning with music software programs. Plus you can enjoy different sounds. You can have oftentimes different piano sounds or even play some baroque music on a harpsichord sound or an organ. So there's a lot of things you can do on a digital that you can't do on an upright.

Well, what are the benefits of upright pianos? Well, if you ever looked inside your piano you can see that there are so many parts to each key. It's a very complex mechanism, the action of an upright piano. While not as complex or as responsive as a grand piano action, they're certainly much more responsive than even the best digital piano actions, try as they might, to mimic the feel of an acoustic piano.

So there are benefits to both. I would say this, if you were talking about a real bottom of the line upright piano, particularly one that is not in good repair or one that is really short that doesn't have much of a good sound or worse yet, a spinet piano. Which has an indirect blow action which is lighter and not as responsive, you might actually be better with a good quality digital. But short of that, I would have to say that an acoustic piano has the edge, not just for feel but also sound.

How could this be? After all, the sound of most digitals take the sample, the recordings, of nine foot concert grands, so they sound glorious and indeed many of them do. However, even if they do multisampling two maybe, even three recordings of each note at different velocity levels of how hard the keys are hit. On a real piano there is an infinite level of expression. So for an advanced student, there is no substitute for that real connection you get with the string and the vibrations and interaction from one key to the next.

However, digitals keep getting better. The best digitals take into account many aspects of the physical model of a real piano. So as time goes on, this question becomes murky, because a good quality digital compared to a lower line upright, you'd have to compare the actual two instruments to really make the determination which is better for you.

Thanks so much for the questions. Again, I am Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com and VirtualSheetMusic.com.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

Thank you for your comment, question or request!

Comment/Question deleted successfully.

Post a comment, question or special request:

Comments or questions must be between 3 and 10,000 characters long.

You may: Login  or  

Otherwise, fill out the form below to post your comment:

Add your name below:


Add your email below: (to receive replies, will not be displayed or shared)


For verification purposes, please enter the word MUSIC in the field below

---