Review
Fantastically concise for a topic where it is tempting to get into the weeds.
I would argue that cheap computing since the debut of MIDI has poached players from the organ, although computer keyboard music does encompass both the piano & the organ. Piano has lost popularity over time (just take a look at the used piano market for evidence of this) but not as much as organ (see church attendance in decline). An organ console for the home is more expensive to produce and house than a PC with a MIDI keyboard. The PC expands the capabilities of what one keyboard can do, and can do more than the king of all instruments, using overdub recording. And it encompases some of the best of both piano and organ, but at reduced barrier to entry.
There are now electric piano midi capable hardware instruments with more than on/off by velocity capabilities and a vibrato pitch wheel. Built into some state of the art electric keyboards is aftertouch effects on both X and Y axises.
This solves for decay and gives expressive options for virtual instruments which were previously impossible in real time.
In general, if an instrument becomes morecapable then, yes, it’s going to make more sense for people to play itrelative to its closest competitors
Price, portability, and ease of learning all matter as well. The guitar does well on all three. Whilst it's not as versatile as keyboards in terms of combining melody and harmony , it's not bad, and applicable to almost any genre.
Agree! Also, my response to the sentence you quoted would be: Playing guitar and playing piano are (for many people) almost entirely separate skills, which feel very different, are learned differently, and have different cultural connotations. People are more likely to base their choice of instrument on that (and the things TAG mentioned) than on some kind of optimization for 'most versatile musical instrument'.
But also I don't disagree with the original quote :) I mean, it definitely seems true that a lot of people play the piano and guitar, fewer (but still many) play slightly less versatile things like violin and saxophone or other strummed instruments like banjo, not very many play piccolo or tuba, and almost no one plays theremin or very culturally specific instruments like bagpipes or shamisen (outside of the culture they're specific to).
The range of sounds and textures it's possible to play on a keyboard is a big advance over what was possible on a piano, and they're also far more portable, need less maintenance, are more flexible with volume, and are cheaper. And you can face other people while you play!
I could be horrendously biased given that I learned piano from Old School Professors in a conservatory, but I've yet to see a keyboard whose sound could be honestly mistaken for an actual fancy piano when the listener is in the same room.
By "in the same room" do you mean in a space that is small enough that people are hearing the piano entirely acoustically? Because then this is going to come down heavily to the quality of speakers you are using with the keyboard, and my guess is you haven't been in a situation where people are connecting a keyboard to "actual fancy" speakers in a small room, since almost no one does this? I think if you actually did this, with a very realistic keyboard, and high-quality full-range speakers, at least 80% of people wouldn't be able to tell.
But this is a tangent: I wasn't trying to claim that a keyboard is strictly better than a piano, just that it is enough more versatile that in many cases you're willing to accept it being slightly worse in the role of "sounds exactly like a traditional piano" in exchange being able to sound like many other things.
By "in the same room" do you mean in a space that is small enough that people are hearing the piano entirely acoustically?
Well, yes, because the traditional setting of a piano concert does not include amplification (as I said, I come from the Old School).
I don't question that you could probably set up a high-quality setting and fool the average person with the keyboard sound, but I would be really surprised if you managed to fool a traditional piano teacher... and those people are the people you actually need to fool if you want any chance of seeing a piano concert with traditional repertoire played on a keyboard (I mean, I've just spent a couple of minutes searching for videos of classical piano pieces played on a keyboard, and I can't find anything above amateur level... I don't think this boils down to just "pianists love tradition").
Anyway, I wasn't dismissing the usefulness of keyboards for study and such, but trust me if I say that conservatory professors do not consider keyboards to be worthy of actual concerts if the music was written for a piano.
I just did a bit of looking under "classical digital piano" and found videos on the Roland LX-17 and Kawai CA901. What do you think?
My impression: this would totally fool the average person, and probably it would fool also me when I'm not paying close attention (not sure about my piano teacher). But you can still hear some small differences. Also, hearing a youtube video is not the same as hearing the real thing, because even the acoustic piano sounds more similar to its electric counterpart given that you're hearing a recording anyway. I suppose that the difference would be bigger when listening to the instruments in person.
I got an email from a reader:
It's a good question! In general, if an instrument becomes more capable then, yes, it's going to make more sense for people to play it relative to its closest competitors. The range of sounds and textures it's possible to play on a keyboard is a big advance over what was possible on a piano, and they're also far more portable, need less maintenance, are more flexible with volume, and are cheaper. And you can face other people while you play!
On the other hand, guitar as an instrument has also gotten better. We've figured out how to make good-sounding acoustic guitars much more cheaply over time, low-end acoustics and electrics are much more playable than they used to be, and the range of what you can do with pedals has expanded. For example, an octave pedal adds a lot to a dance band where the lowest instrument is a guitar, enough that I'd guess 80% of the top guitar-lowest contra dance bands use one.
Another reason we see less substitution than you might expect is that the guitar and piano have very different strengths, and the piano's increased versatility doesn't affect that tradeoff very much. The piano is much more automated: you have much less direct control over the production of the sound. On the guitar you touch the strings, and very small differences change the feeling of your music. On the piano you give that up, but in exchange you can play many more notes at once over a larger range.
If we could see a chart of how new players, comparing guitar vs piano, my guess is we'd see a long slow decline of piano stretching back to ~1910, driven by recorded music substituting for playing at home. Then we'd see guitar rising starting in the 40s as electric amplification became mainstream and made the guitar able to hold it's own in bands. Because musicians are very conservative with instrument choice, it would take decades for the guitar to build up to where it 'should' be for it's strengths. Then, as good portable electronic keyboards became to be available in the late 80s I'd expect to see piano start to recover from its slump, though not pass guitar? If someone has data on this I'd love to see it—quickly searching I didn't find surveys, and sales records are tricky to interpret since pianos generally last longer than guitars.
This is about what people actually do, though, and perhaps you're asking what I think they should be doing? They key benefit of the keyboard to me, relative to the guitar, is how well it works as a way to get note-level information into a computer. This allows building new custom automation, and combining the note and timing information of your fingers with expression information from continuous controllers (foot pedals, breath controllers). This is minimally popular relative to standard piano (or guitar) playing, but I think is a very promising area to explore.
Comment via: facebook