Digital piano

An electronic instrument whose job is to be a piano — a weighted or semi-weighted black-and-white keyboard driving a fixed piano sound — as opposed to a synthesizer, whose keyboard is one possible way into a sound you are expected to build.

The distinction is about what the instrument is for, not about the circuit. Both are digital, both have keys, and a digital piano is often a sampler (sampler) with the sample choice made for you. What separates them is where the design effort goes: a synth spends it on the sound path (oscillators, filters, routing — modular-routing); a digital piano spends it on the keyboard and the enclosure, because key feel is the product and the sound is meant to be settled.

That makes it the natural foil to this spoke's third thesis, that the portable instruments worth watching are the ones organized around not using keys (chord-synthesizer, tracker, oxi-e16). A pocket digital piano makes the opposite bet: keep the keyboard, shrink everything else, and see what is left.

One member so far. orphea is the spoke's only digital piano, and it is unreleased — so this page is a placeholder for an axis, not a survey. The neighbouring pages are keyboard-shaped but belong elsewhere: keylab-mk3 and oxi-e16 make no sound (midi-controller), and m-vave-fm-1 has 27 keys attached to an FM synth. Nothing here yet covers weighted actions, hammer simulation, or the sampled-vs-modelled argument that dominates the category outside this corpus.

Related

orphea · synthesizer · sampler · midi-controller · chord-synthesizer