Sonata in D ouch

I play a bit of piano in my copious free time. A year or two back I bought a Yamaha keyboard for under $200 that’s actually pretty good. It has touch-sensitive keys, meaning the harder to press on a key, the louder the note is, which is essential for any sort of piano playing. At the same time, the keys aren’t weighted (they’re just plastic “tops”), so it doesn’t really mimic the true feel of a piano.

On the other hand, it’s way better than this virtual piano. I’ve seen the virtual keyboard to which it is analogous, which looks interesting in a sort of futuristic space-saving way, but utterly and totally impractical. Though the piano version is kind of a cool idea, I have to imagine that a) the sound generated is pretty poor given the size of the unit and b) the novelty will wear off after about fifteen minutes of pounding your fingers against a hard table . It’s also only a 25 key, 2 octave piano which means playing anything more complicated than the top half of Heart and Soul or the one finger version of Ode to Joy is out of the question. For $130 you can snag yourself a pretty decent keyboard with at least double the number of keys. I think I’ll give it a miss.

[via Gearlog ]