McMick

I just had to upload another sample. This is for @Jokeyman123. I kept it under 200kb this time, though! This is one of the stock Rhodes sounds! This is a straight-to-PC recording, no tweaks, just the default stage setting with some vibrato added. RidersSample1.mp3

This is so weird -- A# 6 is acting up for ME now. Sometimes I hit it and it sounds normal at first but then releases even though I didn't let up on the key. I hope that metallic paper thing works -- and that I don't break the piano when I open it up! I know there are instructions on the forum here about how to do it. I'll report what happens when I get around to doing it. I just find it incredibly strange that it's all A#s in various locations. I've never really studied the interior, so does anyone see a connection to them all?

Whoops wrong forum sorry

Actually the Wurli Cruzr2 stage setting from Mike Martin worked a treat. It's really amazing how close you can get to the real thing! I guess I'll get into editing hex layers another day But thanks for the great replies, especially to Brad for reminding me of stuff I should already know. And thanks to Mike for making my Tramp a little more Super! Update: I just LOVE jamming to this stage setting! And the best part is, I don't have to worry about snapping any reeds! I'm playing this sound more than anything lately. It just makes everything sound awesome. Wurly EP sounds are some of the best keyboard sounds ever made for sure. I could kick myself for selling my 200a, but this goes a long way toward making up for that!

I have to give a note of high praise to the PX-5s and its electric / electronic / "E. Piano" sounds. I would be totally astounded if someone could show me a better sounding keyboard for such things at anywhere near the price. I used to own a 200a and I still own a Rhodes 73 stage piano. I just learned to play the Bloody Well Right intro more or less properly and I have to say, with the '60s E. Piano 2 sound and the right EQ this things sounds better than any of the covers I see up on You Tube right now, with the likes of Korg, Yamaha, Roland, Kurzweil and Nord, and there are many, including one or two played on an actual 200a! I would like to play around with changing a couple of things, though. Namely I'd like to give it a little bit more bell-like sound, and the "bark" sound (which sounds like a separate sound that is only played when I strike the key hard enough, am I right about that?) to come in with a slightly lighter touch, and a bit less loudly above the quieter key strikes. But I don't know how to do any of that. I'm not looking for a step-by-step guide or anything (I know how to navigate the controls and save a stage setting or tone, etc.) but could someone tell me at least the specific settings I need to play with to change these things, especially that last bit? Thanks in advance. P.S. I uploaded an mp3 sample of my practice run (I hope that's OK, it's under 1MB). It's not perfect yet (I miss some harmonic notes in one spot and make a few slight mistakes) but I still think it sounds pretty awesome! I didn't use a metronome or play along with the song or anything, so it might not be 100 percent accurate on speed. Bloody3bmono.mp3

Is there a way to make it sound like my digital piano is being recorded through a microphone? More specifically, I am not trying to alter the sound as such, but rather which keys sound like they were picked up louder than others, as if, for example, the microphone were placed somewhere in the middle of the "soundboard" and picks up the middle notes stronger than the low or high notes. Or if I so chose, the high notes louder and everything else quieter, as if I moved the microphone to the right. Hopefully you understand me. On a related subject, is there an easy way to make specific notes pick up louder than others (short of banging on the key really hard)? I'm using a PX-5S but this seemed like a more generalized question, so I put it in here. Thanks for any replies.

Lol this thread is going out of scope, but just to add, then maybe it's my amplification or something? I just can't seem to play as quietly on a digital piano (I also own an older Yamaha) as I can on a real one. In theory shouldn't I have *more* range on a digital?

The reason I asked about MIDI 2.0 is I heard it has more than 128 levels of resolution or whatever you want to call it, and I've noticed that digital pianos distinctly lack in the fineness of control for things like how loudly I play the note -- in other words, the loudest loud and the softest soft that I can attain on a digital piano doesn't come close to matching the control a real piano gives me. MIDI 2.0 is supposed to give a resolution of millions. Incidentally, it's supposed to be fully backward-compatible with MIDI 1.0 devices. Obviously, if you try to run 2.0 stuff through 1.0 you wouldn't see any benefit, but if you ran 1.0 stuff through 2.0 you might. Does that make sense? I'm challenged in the technical jargon aspect of things here.

MIDI 2.0 PLEASE!!! Thank you :)

I haven't learned enough about this keyboard yet to really have a valid opinion on the more advanced stuff, but one thing for sure I'd like is one-touch recording and playback. As it is, the current method is rather complicated for a novice, in my opinion. But maybe that's not the demographic this model tries to reach. Also, updated PC software with a scalable interface would be highly desirable. The current one is a bit difficult for me to read on my screen, and if I resize it not much changes.

You know guys, in the back of my mind I keep thinking of starting a foundation to rescue all the old model pianos that people are tossing out on a daily basis and warehousing them all somewhere until they could be repaired to good working order and digitally sampled for all time. I find it minor tragedy that all of the great varieties of pianos that were manufactured in the last 125 years are going bye-bye, and a lot of people have never even heard some of them. They should ALL be digitized at some point, especially those rare and notable ones from smaller manufacturers who got swallowed up or went out of business in the pre-digital era.

Pretty much since I've owned this keyboard I've had a problem like a few others in that the action feels great at first, but if I play for a good amount of time, it's too heavy. In response to this, I just went ahead and set the velocity in general settings to light. That way I could hopefully hit the keys a little more lightly and still get full sound. But lately, I've found that I prefer the heavy setting for one reason: expressiveness. In the light mode, it's much more difficult to exert control over the *loudness* of each note, whereas in the heavy setting you get a lot more room to work with, and can make very delicate notes along with very hard ones. So if you're like me and the action on this piano is a too heavy, try putting in the practice and exercises to get your hand strength up (assuming you don't have any conditions preventing you from doing so), and try the heavy setting. I think it works better even than normal for giving that little bit of extra room for more expressiveness.

I've tried a few but nowhere near all. Honestly it's partially due to the fact that my eyesight isn't what it used to be and poring over the display and buttons on this keyboard isn't fun for me. I have the software on my laptop but the interface doesn't scale up, so that's sort of difficult to read as well. In general this is why I haven't bothered yet to buckle down and learn how to do all of the stuff this keyboard is capable of. The other night I was literally thinking about hiring an expert who knows this keyboard to come and train me just to make things easier. I'm not very experienced on digital musical instruments.

I was just reading through the other piano sounds thread and I see that there is a divide here as to whether this keyboard's stock piano sound is right or not. I think it may come down to what people like to listen to. Perhaps people are right and this is an accurate recreation of a particular model of Steinway. Maybe those folks love listening to Liberace play Chopin or whoever. Most of the music I've grown up with was pop and rock music, so in most cases probably not involving a 9-foot Steinway grand piano. I suppose most pop bands would travel with something more portable. This could probably account for why some folks here think the PX-5s piano sound is the best and why I don't. I like the sounds of spinets or uprights or baby grands better. To me they sound more like what I think a piano should sound like. What my solution will be is that I'll use MIDI and a PC to get other piano sounds for this keyboard. Now I just have to figure out how to do that. Thanks for all the replies. Sorry to ruffle any feathers. To end with a positive note, I have to say the electric piano sounds on this keyboard are top notch, and the action is even similar to my old Mark I. I still have a Seventy-Three and I used to own a Wurlitzer 200a, and even out of my awful headphones and guitar amp the electric piano sounds on the PX-5s are really great.

If you move slider 5 around, does that number change at all? (Instead of jumping around at 124-5, does it jump around at different numbers?) Maybe someone could tell you something more, knowing that. Just a suggestion, someone stop me if I'm on the wrong track, but could a plastics-safe contact cleaner/lubricant be used on the sliders? Maybe something got into them. If it worked, it would be a cheap fix.

Ideally I'd like it to pass through a graphic EQ and on to the amp. Someone at a music store told me I could use a PA system for amp/speakers as a cheaper alternative to a stage piano amp or whatever. But at this time I don't plan on spending money on any of that stuff just yet. I haven't played for 10 years, so I'm happy enough to get it hooked to a PC for recording and just use some sound editing app to layer stuff together into something resembling music.

Currently I have some cheapy headphones and a cheapy guitar amp to use for this. I understand that I'm not hearing the sound all nice and equalized, etc. and especially with the cheap guitar amp I get a lot of mid-range frequencies that just stick out. The headphones are OK but they cut off on the higher frequencies somewhat. I'd estimate they're good to around 12kHz then things get dicey from there. I installed a really nice stage setting called Steinway D from Andre Lever which helps it sound much more to my ear like a proper piano. I still want to mess with the decay and sustain, though. Someday hopefully I'll understand how to do that.

Thanks for the help, sorry to have broken any protocols. There are a thousand things to learn on this keyboard but ATM I am only interested in playing it, not editing. The user-made stage settings are a really valuable addition to this instrument, I must say!

Roland's piano is also based off a Steinway, but I guess it must be a different one because it definitely sounds different than the Casio. Don't get me wrong, I like this instrument fine, I just don't feel the piano sound is to my liking. Maybe that's how I should have said it instead of talking about why that is, for the sake of forum decorum (TM). As I've said the electric piano sounds are great and the user-tweaked ones are too, and the Hammond organ sounds are right on as well. There's a lot going for this keyboard, I just wish I could replace the piano with another digitally sampled piano. All the user-made stage settings I've tried so far seem to be based on the factory piano sound. I haven't tried all the user-made stuff yet, though. And I certainly haven't tried editing the sounds myself. This will change in the future at some point, but I just don't have the time right now to go through it all.

OK, I see your point. Sorry for any offense. This is just my opinion. I wouldn't criticize a user this way, but you know something? I paid good money for this keyboard, so I have a right to criticize it. This keyboard has a lot of great stuff on it, like I said I love a lot of things about it. But I've played a good number of pianos in my life and none of them sound like the Casio's piano, including Steinway. Roland makes a real piano sound; Yamaha too. Not so much Casio. The rolloff on the sustain is pretty quick, even though the note will thinly sustain after that. Sounds weird. And the piano sound itself just doesn't sound good. The stereo separation in headphones is so wide that I feel like my keyboard is ten feet long. Although I should add that the user-edited ones I've loaded don't all suffer from that. Isn't the factory sound supposed to be sampled from a real Steinway? If so, it's like no Steinway I've ever heard. Mind you, I do have some peeves about other keyboards. Yamaha has used the same piano sound for decades now. It seems to me like this far into it, nearly 30 years later and everything, there should be hundreds, if not thousands of digitally sampled pianos available, to give at least a partial representation of the many thousands of piano manufacturers and models. Instead the companies just seem to stick with a handful. Maybe it's super-duper hard to make an accurate digital representation of a real acoustic piano, but man I wish they would try. I was sort of hoping some wizard would tell me how to extract the data from another digital piano and convert it to work on the Casio. I mean, it's digital so in theory at least, it should be possible, right? Maybe what I need to do is just hook up to a PC and use samples on that instead. Wish me luck.

I love a lot of things about this keyboard, but I am NOT a fan of the piano sound. It sounds fake and synthetic and the sustain is all wrong. The stereo separation is also pretty extreme in my headphones. I'd like it to have a different piano sound entirely. Is there any way to do this? Ideally I'd like it to sound like a Yamaha or a Roland. Can this be achieved, or are there technical limitations? I've tried a few stage settings I've found here, and while improved for sure, they are still obviously based on the miserable factory piano sound. If it weren't for the great electric piano sounds it comes with I'd honestly have traded this for something else by now. Sorry to sound so complain-y.