Plaidophile

I finally got fed up with not having a piano keyboard of some sort, and I went and bought a Casio PX-300, after falling in love with the 400 at Guitar Center, and previously falling in love with the PS-20 (which first opened my eyes to Casio's "serious" digital pianos) when I visited Spud in Seattle a while ago. (The 300 is essentially the same as the 400, just without most of the useless features and no LCD showing the current GMIDI patch name.)

I also managed, for the first time in my life, to haggle decently. I got the keyboard, a double-braced stand, a bench, a two-year extended warranty performance guarantee (which goes through an actual insurance company and even insures the keyboard for damage while being used in a professional capacity and so on, which the manufacturer's warranty won't even touch), and a gig bag, all for $770 after tax. (For reference, that's a $600 keyboard, a $70ish stand, a $30ish bench, a $30 gig bag, an $80 extended warranty, and 8.25% Manhattan sales tax.) Basically I told the guy about the insane bundles at MusicianBuy.com and said "it's too bad you probably can't match that, since I'd really rather buy from Guitar Center..." And yet he managed to match it!

The PX-300 is amazing, especially for the price. Its keyboard action is way better than any other sub-$1200 digital piano, its piano/keyboard/etc. patches are amazing, and it has some great percussion sets as well. Many of the GMIDI patches are rather lackluster, but that's okay. Also, it's quite slim, and even lighter than my Korg 01/W was, and that was a 61-key spring-action keyboard, not an 88-key graded hammer-action keyboard.

Playing it feels great. It also feels great to play again period, after so long without it. I've felt better piano keyboard actions, but most of them were in actual pianos. As far as digital pianos go this is definitely better than most digital pianos twice the price (aside from the PX-100 and PX-400, of course, which all use the same keyboard), though there's one $1000ish Roland which has a better action, and equally-good piano patches. But, that Roland also doesn't have a complete patch set or percussion patches, and also weighs twice as much.

So far there's only a few things I dislike about it. First off, the interface absolutely sucks. Nearly everything is geared towards the stupid auto-accompaniment; unless you hold down a modifier key, the LEDs display the currently-selected rhythm, even if you have it in GMIDI mode (where it'd be way more useful to see the GMIDI patch number). Also, it doesn't appear to support multiple incoming MIDI channels, and it isn't immediately obvious how to set the main patches via MIDI program changes. (Most of the main patches are the same as their GMIDI equivalents, but some of them — notably the pianos — don't.) The manual might say somewhere in it says they're settable by selecting program banks 1 and 2, but the manual also seems pretty incomplete.

The PX-400 also has a much better method of patch selection; you can press one of the group buttons and then turn the jog wheel to select instruments within that group. Though it still doesn't try to unify the GMIDI patch mapping with the internal patches, so it's still uncertain if you can actually use it as a "real" synthesizer.

It seems kind of stupid to dwell on the patch mapping issue since my primary intent is to use this as a controller for softsynths, but since its patches are so good I want to actually make use of it, too!

Also, the 300 has neither pitch bend nor mod wheels. The 400 has pitch bend, but still no mod. I tend to use those a lot when I'm doing electronica-wank. Fortunately it's not too hard to draw automation tracks in Intuem, and I can always use the sliders on the US428 or the knobs on Fred if I can figure out how to make Intuem remap MIDI controllers. (I don't know if it's actually possible though. Maybe I could suggest it as a feature, adding it to the huge list of other feature requests I've made of them along with the various bug reports.)

One nice thing the PX-300 has which most controllers don't have (but which most digital pianos do) is two pedal inputs, one for damper and one switchable between soft and sustenuto. Of course, the Korg 01/W had like a bazillion pedal inputs (for very small quantities of a bazillion) but none of them could be used for sustenuto. It's pretty neat to see that, though I guess that's standard for digital pianos. It's interesting how the feature sets of digital pianos are so different than the feature sets of synthesizers — digital pianos are done like simulated pianos which happen to have a lot of synthesizer features, whereas synthesizers are more general instruments which happen to have some (usually crappy) piano features.

Incidentally, I think this keyboard's name is Samantha. This would be the second time a musical instrument of mine has insisted it has a name.