LINKS OF INTEREST

The author swings a big, rubber hammer at all of the ill-thought-out, problematic, parroted musical teaching phrases and slogans that have persisted for generations. (Here's a teaser: The author pierces the inflated misconception that the notes on the piano are perfectly in tune. (The modern piano is tuned with a precise, evenly balanced, mathematically formulated tuning where all notes are equally out of tune!)

PROFESSIONAL Keyboard

YAMAHA CP 300

YAMAHA WEBSITE

A note from Paul: Unless you are looking at Yamaha, Kawai or Young Chang acoustic grand pianos in the 25K price range, I highly recommend that you consider the Yamaha CP 300 which is priced at a little over 2K. You will never have to have it tuned and the proportionally weighted, graded hammer keyboard action is as good as it gets. Most importantly, the height of the keyboard and the height of the sustain (damper) pedal may be adjusted to accommodate a young student's size. Learning to use the damper pedal can be accomplished at any age with the help of stacked pairs of small, plastic foot stools.

Meticulously recorded stereo samples of top-quality instruments, taken at various playing strengths, and included subtle elements such as String Resonance (harmonic overtones), Stereo Sustain (open strings while pedaling), and even Key-Off Samples (recordings of felt dampers coming to rest on vibrating piano strings) – providing the most authentic sounding and finely nuanced acoustic piano voices.

Sustain can be partially applied – reproducing the "half-damper" effect

of slightly muting the resonating strings on a real piano.