Marcas’s Review Blog

There’s nothing to beat a real piano. That already takes a star away from anything Roland (or anyone else) has to offer. 

I don’t care for myriads of electronic features.  I do care about the feel under my fingers, the sound in my ears, and a full range of octaves.  And living in an apartment block means I have to consider of the neighbours. 

So an electric piano fits the bill for me, and the synth is upstairs on its end, waiting to be flogged on eBay.  The Roland HP101 provides the full 88 keys, “progressive” hammer action (differently weighted up the register to mimic a grand piano), three pedals and headphone plugs (two of them).

I don’t want for much more.  It does have some electronic programmability - tuning, dual-piano mode, other keyboard types, metronomes, MIDI and stereo interfaces in and out. Most features are programmed via a control button in conjunction with the keyboard, so that besides the power switch, the control panel per se is a discrete set of 4 buttons.

The one feature I do use is the dedicated ‘reverb’ control button.  It adds the brightness of the piano’s ‘decay’.  

But I still yearn, wistfully, after the real thing.  I find at lessons it takes me about five minutes to adjust.   

I came across this excellent little article explaining keyboard features (by googling for ‘synthesisers’ (with no ‘z’)!): http://www.bothner.co.za/articles/buyerkey.shtml