Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is, “Can You Play Expressively on a Portable Piano?” I am presenting an award-winning digital piano for you. I first saw the Casio Privia PX-S1000 and S3000 when it was introduced at the NAMM show, the huge, annual, international music trade show in Anaheim, California. I knew immediately that I wanted to buy one for myself! You might wonder why. I have all kinds of pianos. I have the top-of-the-line Casio Grand Hybrid and my beautiful semi-concert grand Baldwin SF10. Why would I need this? Well, with the Casio Privia PX- S3000, you just take off four thumb screws, and you’ve got a 24-pound piano you can take with you anywhere! It even runs on batteries! And I was blown away by the sound. The on-board speakers are really nice, the action feels great. I just love this piano! I even got one for my daughter! I think it’s an ideal piano for a lot of folks. And It’s only a few hundred bucks. How can you beat it? Casio has been winning awards like crazy on these pianos. It’s really pretty remarkable.
What’s the difference between the PX S1000 and the PX S3000?
There are more sounds and rhythms on the 3000. But you get the same action, the same speakers, the same high quality piano sounds on both. You also get the addition of a pitch bend wheel and a couple of continuous controllers on thePX S3000. It also has 700 sounds, which is massively more than the 18 assorted sounds on the PX S1000. But if you just want piano and keyboard sounds, the 1000 is a great choice.
There’s so much to love about this piano. It has Bluetooth, so you can use the speakers to stream music from your phone and play along! You also get the incredible Chordana app. This app gets you to all the functions of the piano easily. If you’ve ever used a digital piano, trying to do splits, layers, adjusting the touch, and other functions on a little screen, you know how difficult it can be. On this piano, you just use an iPad or your phone, even an Android phone, and you get to all the functions right in front of you! It even has music education software built in. It’s really pretty amazing.
There have been some questions about the action on this piano. I think the action is stellar for a piano of this type.
One of the challenges with any digital piano is being able to fit an action into a compact package. This is such a sleek cabinet, it’s unbelievable how they fit an action in here. So the question is, can you play expressively on this piano? If you want to know more about the Casio Privia PX S1000 and S3000, there are lots of great videos online. But, today, I’m going to focus on whether you can play expressively on these pianos.
In the accompanying video, I played a little bit of Chopin’s B-flat Minor Nocturne, a piece that has all sorts of flourishes, fast notes, and slow notes, to see if it’s possible to get good control out of this digital piano. You can watch that here:
So, if you want a piano that you can take anywhere, there’s even a backpack that you can pop this thing in. You can take this piano to gigs, to friends, even out to the park to play the piano! I can’t think of anything more fun than this, a piano you can take anywhere!
I’m interested in your opinion. Did you think that was expressive playing? Any of you who have these pianos at home, I’d love to hear your comments.
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!
Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729