| An OK Keyboard With a Few Annoying Quirks |
My wife and I are professional musicians and teachers, so we are quite discerning and expect a lot when it comes to musical instruments, even if they are inexpensive electronic keyboards. Although this keyboard does what it says and basically is as described, there are a few design quirks that could have easily been remedied which would have made this an exceptional keyboard, rather than just a mediocre one.
First--and I think this was mentioned in other reviews--the volume issue is extremely annoying. Even at the lowest setting, it is pretty loud. If you are planning on giving this to a child, watch out! Every time you turn it on, it resets to the loudest volume setting. Our son is two years old, and he's figured out the surest way to annoy us: keep turning the keyboard off and on, which resets the volume to full blast mode. He really enjoys this, of course, but it annoys us to no end. We are mystified as to why Casio didn't design this keyboard to reset a medium volume setting or even the lowest volume. The loud setting is too loud even for us, and we live and breathe music.
Furthermore, every time the keyboard is turned off and on, not only is it super loud, but it resets to a awful-sounding hip-hop version-sounding Beethoven's Ode to Joy. They could have easily designed this to stay on the last song selection. There should be an option to allow people to let it store the last song.
Our last main complaint is that it's not as easy as it should be play the keyboard along with the stored songs. Casio really expects you to only play a melody with the songs, hence the very limited four-voice polyphony (this means that you can only play four notes at once). If you want to play a full chord with a root, third, fifth and seventh (a V7 or MM7 chord, for example) or a 9th chord along with a melody, you are out of luck. It will only let you play four notes at once, so your chords (such as a left hand accompaniment) will be limited to triads. For a little more money, you can purchase a keyboard that has 16-note polyphony, which will allow you to play true accompaniment with melodic lines.
There is no pedal jack, which might not be that big a deal for a beginner, but somewhat limits your learning how to play a keyboard.
Other than the previously mentioned quirks, the keyboard is somewhat well made. There are 100 "tones" (poor-sounding keyboard sounds, such as piano, electric piano, organ, etc.--the Amazon summary says "top notch", but they're not), 30 patterns (rock, swing, samba, waltz, etc.), and 10 songs. This keyboard supposedly allows you to turn off the melody, but apparently, will not allow you to do that with the all of the songs in the sound bank--just a few, such as the Skater's Waltz. When you turn off the melody, you can play along, but otherwise, you can't. This seems silly to us. The quality of the songs themselves is OK at best, as you would expect from a low-end Casio keyboard. (You can play will all of the patterns, however.) If you're expecting a real orchestral or rock band sound, you're in for a surprise. It sounds like a merry go round toy. Our son doesn't know the difference (and many consumers won't care), but we can tell.
The LCD screen is OK, but very tiny, and our guess is that most people will ignore it. The staff that the notes appear on is less than an inch wide, which is NOT at all how musicians read music. They could have easily made the LCD screen 3 times longer so you could see three notes at once, or even a whole phrase. After all, when you start to read real music, you will read off a whole page, not a tiny LCD screen, one note at a time.
It's not all bad: the keyboard includes a headphone jack and the batteries last a long time, which is great.
All in all, if you don't have a child, this keyboard might prove adequate for learning how to play a melody with a pattern or song, but there are certainly other options out there that are a LOT better than this one. If we could do it all over again--and we probably will--we will definitely purchase a different keyboard. As an educational tool, we have to give this "two thumbs down." |
2 Rating
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