Ever since stringed keyboard instruments started becoming household fixtures, folks have been trying to figure out ways to make them less invasive, less space-filling, and less annoying to the neighbors. Only the few can afford, or have the room for, or the isolation for, a full-sized concert grand piano in the living room. For most of us, even a smaller grand is asking too much of our wallets, building foundations, and available space—not to mention the tolerance of all and sundry in hearing distance.
So the harpsichord spawned the virginals and the spinet, both smaller and quieter instruments that could be slid in against the wall or tucked into a corner. The clavichord, a beautiful instrument that barely registers a whisper, was apparently JS Bach’s preferred teaching instrument for his younger pupils. And then along came the pianoforte: bigger, louder, heavier, and in general much more of a rugged individualist than plectral keyboard instruments, pianos started taking over during the late eighteenth century. By the 1820s the piano was the dominant domestic instrument and was bulking up dramatically. Leather-covered hammers gave way to larger felt jobs; strings became thicker and more numerous; the steady drive for added brilliance meant more tension and eventually one-piece cast-iron frames to keep the thing from collapsing inwards like an accordion. Along with that came weight, size, cost, and volume.
Those floor-busting grand pianos were accompanied by various smaller and notably more modest affairs, mostly upright pianos of various sorts—including those bizarre giraffe, pyramid, and lyre pianos of the earlier 19th century—but also square grands, which adapted the transverse stringing of the virginals. Uprights could be big and hefty pieces of furniture, but as the 20th century progressed they were sent off to Weight Watchers and slimmed down. Like Alice in Wonderland, they shrank down, curiouser and curiouser. My first piano was a so-called “spinet”—a tiny thing not much higher than the keyboard, tinny and unattractive sounding but sporting curvy French Provincial furniture to match the brocaded horrors of our suburban living room. Eventually I graduated onwards to a “console” model, a bit higher and heftier but still notably lacking in sound, a baby piano and not the real thing at all.
The problem with uprights, no matter how exalted their makers, is that they cannot offer the same richness of tone as a full-sized horizontal instrument. Nor are their actions as good, being mostly spring-loaded rather gravity-driven. And don’t even get me started on the damper pedal, on a grand almost infinitely malleable but worked by springs on an upright and therefore divorced almost entirely from the dampers the pedal is designed to control.
Upright pianos, in other words, are only a pale reflection of the real thing and are invariably unsatisfactory tonally compared to a proper piano. But if you’re living in a smaller house or an apartment, and/or you aren’t made out of money—i.e., a regular person and not Bill Gates or the Sultan of Brunei—a full-sized grand isn’t practical, or even remotely possible. And the whole noise thing remains a major issue. Neighbors have a right to their own peace of mind, and nothing says three-Excedrin headache faster than a kid whacking through the Khachaturian Toccata for two hours a day.
Many upright pianos replace the middle-pedal sostenuto with a “practice mute”, a hell-spawn of vileness that drapes a length of felt between the hammers and the strings. The end result is a muted mush, barely recognizable as a piano sound at all and guaranteed to dry up any lingering remnants of a player’s tonal imagination. Only a tone-deaf pianist who conceives of playing the instrument exclusively in physical terms has any business playing on a practice-muted upright.
At this point enter the digital piano, the unheralded and unfairly maligned answer to many a prayer. High-end digital pianos come close to offering the perfect home practice-piano for almost everybody. Note that caveat: I said high-end digital pianos. I am not referring to plastic-y synthesizers with wobbly organ-like keys and nasty thin sound. I am talking about instruments built around a full-sized keyboard action, including those with proper weighted wooden keys and hammers (that don’t actually hit anything) and that offer intensively sampled acoustic pianos as their tonal resources.
This is no place to provide a text on digital sampling—nor do I trust myself to navigate the technological details reliably—but a short description is in order. Digital sampling records the sound of an instrument, note by note and at any number of different volume levels and tonal shadings. The samples are then played back when you play the instrument—it’s sort of like playing a recording of an acoustic instrument. Pianos are particularly thorny instruments to sample, given the rich variety of their tonal resources. To begin with, the very tonal envelope of a piano note changes by volume—at louder levels more overtones are produced. Therefore each key of the piano must be sampled at a number of volume levels, the more the merrier, capturing those shifts of tone; you can’t just play back a single sample at louder or softer volume levels without a dreadfully unconvincing result. Then you have to deal with the combined action of the damper pedal, which offers sympathetic vibrations from other strings, and the effect of the leftmost, or una corda pedal, which requires its own separate set of samples for each note. There’s more, but you get the general idea.
A really good sampled piano needs buckets of storage space. A stand-alone digital instrument can do it, thanks to modern advances in storage capabilities, but connecting a high-quality digital piano via MIDI to a computer running a high-end sampled software piano still remains the strategy for connoisseurs of digital-piano goodies.
My practice instrument of choice is a fine Yamaha Clavinova, one of the top of the line models with weighted wooden keys. The Clavinova is about the same size and weight as an upright piano, acres removed from some crass black-plastic keyboard. I connect the Clavinova via MIDI to my MacPro, which runs Synthogy’s Ivory, an astonishingly well-made digitally sampled piano requiring abundant gigabytes of disk space, plenty of RAM, and a good fast processor. Given those requirements, Ivory creates an utterly compelling digital piano, especially given that I hear the sound output through a pair of Sennheister HD 800 headphones, driven by a Benchmark DAC1 processor which decodes the binary audio into analog current for driving headphones.
This is not an inexpensive rig. In fact, the total cost of the Yamaha, the Mac Pro, Ivory, the Senn 800s and the Benchmark belong in the realm of a decent-quality small grand piano. But the small grand piano is just that—small—while the Yamaha/Ivory combo sounds as a full-sized Hamburg Steinway, beautifully voiced and maintained, positioned in a warmly supportive acoustic environment. Nor does the digital instrument require tuning or maintenance: it always sounds the same. I’m something of a detail freak in my own playing, and having the sound of the piano up close and personal like that, heard through the headphones, allows me to tailor my playing with care and precision. And I can play whenever I want, never worrying about bothering anybody or feeling self-conscious about others hearing playing from me that isn’t really ready yet for primetime.
Nothing is perfect and compromises are necessary. I don’t have the pedal detail that comes with an acoustic piano. Sympathetic vibrations from other strings isn’t up to full-tilt acoustic quality as of yet. The interactions between dampers and keys and strings, some of them extremely subtle, just aren’t there. There’s a lot missing. The sound originates from inside my head, rather than in front of me as it would be with a real piano. Maybe it’s just a little too perfect.
But for my own work here at home, the Yamaha/Ivory combo beats all handily. It offers a level of sound quality untouchable in an acoustic piano at the price and frees me from having to adjust to out-of-tune instruments or the clank of a piano that needs a good (and expensive) voicing. I would never want to play a concert on the Yamaha/Ivory, mind you. But I don’t mind making recordings with it, as I have been doing with my Haydn Sonatas project. (I really must get that thing started back up at some point.)
Technology has brought its share of sorrow to our world, but it has also given us some wonderful gifts. Pianists would do well to explore the reality of today’s digital pianos, and not just assume that they’re ipso facto vastly inferior to their acoustic brethren. In a surprising number of cases, today’s best digital instruments can run circles around all but the higher end of traditional acoustic pianos.