Hi everyone
Please don't despair completely as I have doen some research first before ploughing in with my 'what piano should I buy' question. But, I still need help and I'm hoping this is the right place!!
Right then. I am a beginner. I started playig the piano when I was a kid but gave up. Now have two sprogs of my own and as well as wanting to play again myself (really looking forward to it actually), we would like the kids to grow up learning to play (until they give up like I did no doubt!!)
Now to the pianos. My budget is understandibly limited as we don't exactly know how we will all get on (keen as we are now) so we can't go mad. I would definatley not like to go beyond £3k. And that really is an absolute max.
Fortunatley in terms of decision making it was looking oh so easy (until yesterday - more later)
Firstly my father recently bought a Yamaha B1. Very nice I thought, played it using my old learning books before trying to bash out 'If I were a rich man' (I wish indeed). Sounds fine to my untrained ear - he bought it from a local dealer whose rep is good.
Second pience of the puzzle was that we decided we wanted a 'silent' piano. The piano is going to go in the lounge and as our kids a still young it seems a great idea on many levels - firstly so I can practice while the wife watched 'The resturant' (as it would be tonight anyway) and secondly we will appreciate it when the kids are practicing later!!
SO, its all looking very very nice. The B1 does indeed have this option. The B1 seems to have good write ups, especially for the money, its an ideal size for us and seems to suit amateurs down to the ground. The price is dooable.
BUT.
I start doing more reaearch.
and I see comments like this: (PianoGuy back in Sept) - see, done my research!!
"The b1 and b2 Silent pianos are not equipped with MIDI of any description!
What a cheapskate load of crap they are then. The most useful feature of a Silent is not the digital piano noise through the headphones, but the fact that it can be used to operate other MIDI devices and also be used as a composition aid with Cakewalk, Cubase and the like. Yamaha deserve to lose sales over this, and I'm sure they will. It would have cost about a fiver per unit to build into the design, so if they've cut corners here, where else have they cheapened it?
I'm putting the Kawai Anytime (silent equivalent) on my list of recommendations from now on.
Yamaha should be ashamed of themselves."
Clearly PianoGuy is a person to be respected so I gets a bit worried.
But, sorry to critise such austere company but he said above:
"The most useful feature of a Silent is not the digital piano noise through the headphones, but the fact that it can be used to operate other MIDI devices"
hmm, I'm thinking. The digital piano through the headphones is exactly why I want it, nothing else had crossed my mind.
So, I would be very grateful if you good people could let me know what I am missing here because I don't want to regret my purchase 5 years down the line when one day I desperatly need the MIDI. I can't see myself composing etc via the computer and I'm not convinced it will be essential for my kids when they are older (after all, how do all the other kids cope whose family do not have such equipment) and, if they needed something like that we could get a cheap keyboard for that job in a few years.
Basically the B1 seems to tick my boxes but £2.5k is a lot of money and I don't want to regret my purchase for the sake of a few hundred quid.
Any advice is very very welcome!!
Finally the other thing that is bugging me slightly is the on-line discounts you can get. I fully understand (thanks to this forum!) the benefits of getting a piano properly prepared to start with and from a local dealer and therefor not getting such a good discount, but, how do I know that my local dealer will prepare it well, will offer good after sales service etc. The only thing I can go on is price. If I ask him 'do you prepare it properly up front and offer good after sales service' then unless he was trained at Dixons on Saturdays, he will say 'yes'. Are there any little tips I can ask him to try and weedle out the truth?
My final thought is that whenever I buy any item of value - be it a new telly, a new car, a new hi-fi, a new camera there is ALWAYS an almost, but not quite perfect product in my price range!! I do get bored with all the 'sacrfices' one has to make.
'If I were a rich man....'
Oh no, here comes another newbie question...
Moderators: Feg, Gill the Piano, Melodytune
What a nice post!
If all you require from your piano is a reasonably good sound, acceptably good build quality and the ability to use 'phones, the b1Silent will fit the bill. The b1 is a Yamaha piano but a very basic one. A (Kemble-built) Yamaha P114 beats the pants off it for acoustic tone production, and sounds infinitely more 'live' but it is appreciably more expensive. If you are going to use 'phones for the majority of the time this is less important, since the actions are so similar.
Note that the action in any Silent upright has a different 'set-off' distance (the point at which the action's escapement lets go of the hammer) from the standard version, so make sure you try one first. Some players find them a bit slack, and repetition in the extreme treble can be poor unless the regulation is spot on. The Silent adaptation also means that a tuner may find muting strings in the treble more awkward, so watch out that tuning can sometimes suffer. In short, the standard version plays better than a Silent.
My beef about the lack of MIDI is mainly that it would have cost pennies to include, and severely limits the usefulness of the instrument, although a Yamaha dealer with whom I was having this debate last week claims the lack thereof has done little to dampen sales. The addition of this feature would enable the piano to become the centre of a computer-based composition program (perfect for GCSE and A-Level music) and to produce other sounds electronically. The better Silent pianos already come fitted with 9 other instrument voices together with rudimentary recording facilities via USB so the b1 and b2 systems really are the poor relation.
If all you require from your piano is a reasonably good sound, acceptably good build quality and the ability to use 'phones, the b1Silent will fit the bill. The b1 is a Yamaha piano but a very basic one. A (Kemble-built) Yamaha P114 beats the pants off it for acoustic tone production, and sounds infinitely more 'live' but it is appreciably more expensive. If you are going to use 'phones for the majority of the time this is less important, since the actions are so similar.
Note that the action in any Silent upright has a different 'set-off' distance (the point at which the action's escapement lets go of the hammer) from the standard version, so make sure you try one first. Some players find them a bit slack, and repetition in the extreme treble can be poor unless the regulation is spot on. The Silent adaptation also means that a tuner may find muting strings in the treble more awkward, so watch out that tuning can sometimes suffer. In short, the standard version plays better than a Silent.
My beef about the lack of MIDI is mainly that it would have cost pennies to include, and severely limits the usefulness of the instrument, although a Yamaha dealer with whom I was having this debate last week claims the lack thereof has done little to dampen sales. The addition of this feature would enable the piano to become the centre of a computer-based composition program (perfect for GCSE and A-Level music) and to produce other sounds electronically. The better Silent pianos already come fitted with 9 other instrument voices together with rudimentary recording facilities via USB so the b1 and b2 systems really are the poor relation.
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Piano Worker
- Junior Poster
- Posts: 10
- Joined: 15 Sep 2007, 11:20
PianoGuy wrote:What a nice post!
If all you require from your piano is a reasonably good sound, acceptably good build quality and the ability to use 'phones, the b1Silent will fit the bill. The b1 is a Yamaha piano but a very basic one. A (Kemble-built) Yamaha P114 beats the pants off it for acoustic tone production, and sounds infinitely more 'live' but it is appreciably more expensive. If you are going to use 'phones for the majority of the time this is less important, since the actions are so similar.
Note that the action in any Silent upright has a different 'set-off' distance (the point at which the action's escapement lets go of the hammer) from the standard version, so make sure you try one first. Some players find them a bit slack, and repetition in the extreme treble can be poor unless the regulation is spot on. The Silent adaptation also means that a tuner may find muting strings in the treble more awkward, so watch out that tuning can sometimes suffer. In short, the standard version plays better than a Silent.
My beef about the lack of MIDI is mainly that it would have cost pennies to include, and severely limits the usefulness of the instrument, although a Yamaha dealer with whom I was having this debate last week claims the lack thereof has done little to dampen sales. The addition of this feature would enable the piano to become the centre of a computer-based composition program (perfect for GCSE and A-Level music) and to produce other sounds electronically. The better Silent pianos already come fitted with 9 other instrument voices together with rudimentary recording facilities via USB so the b1 and b2 systems really are the poor relation.
