This is a great digital piano for the modern era. Coming from a smaller ‘portable grand’ this has full size weighted keys with a full 88 key layout. The quality of the piano sound is very good, with both the basses having a serious oomph (biggest difference with the portable grand), and and high notes also sounding very crisp. It can sound a tad compressed in the middle especially when comparing to a good real piano, but hey, it already beats some low end real pianos. For this price point I think it is still very good (and always in tune unlike that real piano ;)) . Comparing it to obvious digital competition like Roland, I think it sounds more like a piano than like a digital piano, is probably the best way I can describe it and why I liked the Yamaha better.
The other sounds on the keyboard are all pretty excellent too. It isn’t a huge range, the focus is still on being a digital piano, but you’ve got a decent set of (4) variations for each of the sound groups that all sound great and give you almost everything you’d need on stage. Sound groups are piano, electronic piano, organ, clav, strings and bass. A special shout-out to an excellent choir sound in the strings group.
You can do all the obvious things you can think of with this piano such as splitting, layering, or even set up two pianos for teaching purposes (where dual headphones are a nice touch too) or playing stuff for two pianos on this one piano. It also comes with a good rhythm and automatic bass accompaniment that I wouldn’t have expected on a digital piano per se but is still very useful - though here I would then have liked a quiet and busy mode for the drum section so you can build up a song with it, but hey I didn’t expect his to be here at all, and the quality of the drums is otherwise very good.
And then the best part for me and what made this piano a no brainer vs the competition - how well it works with an iPad or iPhone. If you get yourself a camera cable (I recommend the one that also extends the original lightning port) you can then hookup this piano to your iPad and use the great App that Yamaha provides as well as Apples more than excellent and practically free Garageband and take everything to a whole new level. Yamaha’s own app already goes above and beyond by not only providing a nice UI for everything you can do on the piano, but adds features like saving multiple configurations, recording both midi and digital data, and even automatically writing out your songs to sheet music.
And what makes the interaction with Garageband so great is not only complete support for both midi and direct digital audio in, but your piano will also function as speakers for your iPad or iPhone, so that you can hear everything you do in Garageband on your pianos very decent stereo speakers. All the digital instruments garageband provides, all the great multitrack recording and editing features, it is just like your iPad supercharged your digital piano. Heck you can even use it for getting great audio to your Netflix or Spotify etc.
It goes to far to go into every detail of what you can do with this piano, but in summary, I am very, very happy with it and highly recommend it. The only reason to check out the competition is when you really only want a digital piano and nothing else and you only care for as much a piano like key press as possible, then there are alternatives with a more realistic piano key action.
