Yamaha P80: I Love this Piano
Written: Jul 21 '00 (Updated Jan 16 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: great sounds, compact, good price
Cons: no expandability, minimal MIDI, not many onboard effects
The Bottom Line: Still not quite "real", but for the price, comes as close as I need for what *I* do. Not for gadget junkies; not enough toys on it.
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| platypus55's Full Review: Yamaha Portable Keyboard Bag for P80 |
The short word on the Yamaha P80
I searched long and hard for just the right piano at the right price. I ended up with a Yamaha P80 and I must say I love it. I have a weighted 88-key 35-pound box that feels and sounds like a real piano. I can put it in my car easily. Mostly I just play the basic piano sounds, but I can fire up the other voices and use the effects when I want them. I hook it up to my Peavy KB/A60 or the house PA and we can generally make it sound pretty good. With headphones (not included) I can practise at odd hours and not bother anyone.
About me and my needs/wants
I am a classically trained pianist. I am working on a solo album of Celtic music arranged for voice, traditional instruments, and some keyboards. I needed a keyboard that was portable and yet capable of producing good piano sounds and a good piano "feel," and I didn't have $4500 to spend. For fun I also do some jazz backup with a sax player and trap player. What I didn't really care too much about were the MIDI features or on board effects, because the keyboard sounds so good out of the box. Basic MIDI and sequencing features (what the P80 offers) was just fine with me.
The gear
My P80 came with the following accessories:
1) a detatchable music rack
2) a sustain pedal with cord.
What you don't get
The P80 achieves its lightness by having no onboard reinforcement. If you want that, go for its big brother the P200.
The sounds
The P80 gives you a dozen immutable sounds. Many of these voices would pass for real in a recording, with the right setup, a competent engineer, the right levels, etc. You get:
1. Grand (could be grander but very good)
2. Classical
3. Jazz
4. Rock
5. Epiano
6. Epiano 2 (a rhodes like sound)
7. Harpsi
8. Strings -- cheesy but work well as padding
9. Pipe organ
10.Church organ
11.Jazz organ
12.Bass (very convincing!)
In addition, each sound can be modified easily with the variation key. This is especially notable on the organ sounds. You can also concoct novel noises by mixing any two sounds in any proportion you like. I have used this feature to good effect -- mixing just a little bit of epiano in with the rock one, for example, or combining the various organs to simulate other organ stops. Getting this the way you want it is not so straightforward, but it is worth your while to learn how.
Other ways to tweak the sounds:
There is a brilliance slider which alters brightness for most of the sounds. You can tweak the reverb by selecting a preconfigured ambience: You get your choice of Room, Hall1, Hall2, or Stage. Those names don't mean much, so you just have to play with this. You also have four built-in and pre-configured effects: Chorus, symphonic, tremolo, and delay. If you go into geekie mode, you can adjust the preset depth of both reverb and the effects. Finally, it has four modes of touch: soft, medium, hard, and fixed. I'll say more about this in a minute, but which touch you select ultimately effects the sound of the voices as well.
You can't expand or alter the sounds, but that's OK with me: I very much like the piano and organ and bass sounds it has.
Feel/touch
Feel is a very personal thing, and it was a primo consideration for me when selecting keys. At any touch setting, this piano feels good to me. I have played other pianos with decent sounds, but the touch is weird. One millimeter of pressure too much and you've suddenly gone from p to f. You recoil from that and it affects your playing. I tried Kurzweils and they felt "boingy" to me. I also tried the Kawai stage piano, which had a nice feel as well, but I didn't like the sounds as much, and it was twice the price. I just couldn't "cook" on some of the other boxes that I tried. I can do any jazz and Celtic backup I want on this P80 without gagging. Beethoven's F-minor sonata Mvt 4 defeated it, but that is some VERY technical playing, and if I ever played that in public I would want a grand piano anyway.
The P80 has four touch settings: soft, medium, hard, and fixed. Medium feels like a Steinway; soft feels like some of the brilliant uprights out there. I use hard sometimes to simulate the feel of a tracker organ. Fixed is also good for practising organ. I wish the sustain pedal would act like a swell on that setting. (Oh well.) The sustain pedal does a good job of simulating dampers off on the voices for which that concept is meaningful. It has a good feel as well.
Other standard features
The P80 supports all the standard features you would expect from a professional keyboard:
1) Key transpose (if your ear can stand it!!)
2) Split (you set the split point)
3) Metronome
4) Quick 'n dirty 2 channel sequencer: I use this to record hands separately on difficult pieces.
The Geekie stuff
The P80 has a surprising amount of geekie stuff hidden deep within it's bowels. You access these via the function keys, and then you scroll through your options within each function. This is the least user-friendly part of the box, but I'm happy because they would have had to load the control panel with a lot more buttons and that would have made it more expensive. Here is a brief rundown of the functions:
1) Tuning: If you want to play with something weird like bagpipes you can alter the overall tuning from A=427 to A=453.
2) Scales: If Equal Temperament doesn't suit you, you have your choice of seven other scales. Of course once you do this, you also have to tell it which base key you wish to tune to. (Good for period music.)
3) Dual functions: You can control dual balance, dual detune, and you can shift either voice an octave either way. This actually gives you a heck of a lot of sound possibilities.
4) Split functions: You can manipulate the split point and the split balance, shift octaves, control the effect depths separately, and choose the damper effects separately. This is useful when you want to use a sostenuto effect on one voice but have another going that would not be affected by the damper in real life.
5) Soundboard resonance depth (piano sounds only)
6) Metronome volume
7) Something with the demo songs (I don't use these so I can't comment)
8) MIDI functions (more than you might think!!)
9) Backup functions
In addition, the P80 offers direct connections to PC's for applications (such as a software sequencer) for which MIDI is not needed.
Durability, warranty, and repairs
It is one year old and now out of warranty, It has not done anything bad, so I still can't comment on repairs. One reason I bought it was that internet reviews I read in music places seemed to agree that it was much more durable than comparable Kurzweils.
[Edit on 09 Feb 01: Just to update everybody, the P80 has been performing superbly since I got it six months ago. For Christmas my mom asked what I wanted and I said, the official gig bag for the P80, not some generic case, since I had been taking it out a bit here and there. My local store didn't have it, and neither did hers. I looked online and found nothing. I found a store an hour from home that was charging $139 for it, and I was just about ready to drive up there and get it when I found it on zzounds.com for $85 + $6 S. You do the math here. I saved my mom $50 and a two hour drive. I mention this because the zzounds link does not just show up in every search engine so you might not find it. I can't remember now just exactly how I did finally find it. The company was fine to deal with--they took a couple weeks to send me the bag but they told me this was going to happen.]
These keys aren't for everybody. If you like gazillions of sounds, sophisticated MIDI control, and all kinds of geeky tweaky effects, stay away from it. If you're like me and you just want to play and sound good, then I recommend the P80 for you.
Thanks for reading. I hope you have found this information useful.
---Colleen
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
platypus55
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Member: Colleen
Location: Pacific Northwest
Reviews written: 117
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