Yamaha Piaggero

Time for an update? Well, I'm glad to say that I've been honing my keyboard skills a bit since I acquired the Yamaha Piaggero not too long ago. This is a very nice keyboard with some pretty good sounds on it. The price is affordable, though I hate that term because who is anyone to determine what is affordable for anyone else? But it was affordable for me and when you include the accessories package--bench, stand, power cord, sustain pedal and piano book--it was a super great, unbeatable price.

I chose the 61 key version because I felt it would be sufficient for me to use and store in my already tiny and cramped room. The 76 key version would have been nicer but also would have taken a bit more room but not much more. Now that I think about it I probably should have gotten the 76 but really this one here suits me completely.

It has 2 sounds each for piano, electric piano, organ, harpsichord as well as string and vibraphone sounds. I mainly use the piano and organ tone banks. The electric piano sounds are not bad at all with one sounding much better than the other. This is true of the organ as well. I find myself always using only one of the 2 organ sounds and one of the 2 electric piano sounds. The acoustic piano choices feature a brighter and a darker sound. Both sound good enough for recording.

Speaking of recording, it has a built in feature for recording that you can play back while you play live on the keys. That is very useful. Also includes metronome sounds.

A feature that I accidentally came across (and then later read in the manual) is a reverse-sustain effect with the sustain pedal. Normally you plug in the sustain pedal and when you press it you get sustain. But I discovered that if you press the pedal while you turn on the power to the keyboard you get the opposite effect; you'll have sustain all the time except when you press the pedal!

I like having sustain all the time. Just sounds better to me. Of course, this doesn't sound good with the organ sounds. But with piano and electric piano it's great.

And one of the biggest selling points of this keyboard for me was the built-in speakers.  It is so nice to be able to play along without either using headphones or having to connect it to an amp or something.

My goals with getting this instrument was to play every day/night and significantly improve my keyboard skills and to use it to compose music. Using only a guitar to compose all your music is limiting in my opinion and leads to creating similar sounding songs or at best, repeated chord progressions. Using a keyboard opens up a new world in terms of composing.

So while I haven't played this instrument every day/night I have improved my skills already and have even learned to play a few songs albeit not without stumbling and making errors. But it feels good knowing how to play some songs and getting those fingers all independent-minded.

Here are photos of both the 61 key and 76 key versions:

Rocky Mount Instruments (RMI) Electra-Piano

I love finding out what certain instruments I hear on recordings actually are. For instance, long ago, I remember hearing a lot of songs that featured organ, but on some of these very same songs the organ would take on two different personalities in terms of sound. On quiet passages it would be that smooth, pure electric organ sound. But during louder passages it was a shaky, warbling sound and I had no idea how that was attained. After all, I had only had some cheap synthesizers with solely that clear organ sound. It wasn't until I talked with a more experienced fellow musician about it that I learned the warbling tone came from using a Leslie Speaker with the organ. From that point I did a ton of research on Leslie speakers and found out that basically there were rotating speakers inside a wooden cabinet that when turned on applied the scientific principle of the Doppler effect in order to create that unique sound. OK, so I guess it's not just instruments but also effects that are meant to be used with instruments. Anyway it's exciting to learn new things such as this and today I learned one more thing.

There was a musical instrument that was used in several songs that I really like from the early 1970s. It was clearly a keyboard-type instrument and I kept thinking it was some kind of electric harpsichord. It was certainly not a Fender Rhodes nor a Wurlitzer nor an electric clavinet. As I researched videos for vintage electric harpsichords online and listened to their sounds I was not fully convinced I was on the right track.

Here is one of the songs I first heard this instrument on. It is right at the start of the song and plays throughout. The song is not in English, as it is a Brazilian song from 1972. Check it out:




Interesting sound, right? Well, today I decided to play one of the many LP's I have which I will be selling. It happened to be Bread's debut album from 1969 which I bought during my sole visit to the now-defunct, annual Mammoth Music Mart. I picked up 4 LP's and several cd's that day. But as I played the Bread album I pulled out the sheet with lyrics and credits and looked over the instruments each member of the band played. There was one called RMI electric piano. I had never heard of that before. I'm sure I looked at that sheet dozens of times before but I never sought out to discover exactly what an RMI electric piano was. Today I did, though, and I found a video of a dude playing one on YouTube. And it was exactly that sound in those songs!! I can't really pick out where it was used on any of the Bread songs on that album but I will have to listen again more carefully.

The interesting thing about this instrument is that it was fully electronic, using transistors instead of any electro-mechanical parts to generate the sound. The 300 series (which were probably used in these songs) came out in 1970 so the timing is definitely right.

Check out this video of someone playing this instrument:





And now one more of the songs that had the RMI in it:



It's not as prominent throughout this song as it was in the first song. It starts to come in during the latter part of the solo in the middle of the song. It is not to be confused with the Fender Rhodes which plays throughout the song.

So I'm pretty pleased to have learned something accidentally today, especially considering it was something I've been trying to figure out for quite some time!