Hi Robert,
I played the Kurzweil 250 in the late 80’s for a temple job and loved it! The digitized sounds actually Felt like I was playing harps, guitars, strings, etc. and the organs were marvelous. Even the piano was amazing, considering I’m a classically trained pianist/organist and am used to the “Real Thing”, including huge pipe organs. Later on, when Kurzweil sold out to Young Chang I thought the quality went way down, but it’s possible they couldn’t afford the big instrument. But that 250 was a real treasure. Do they sell anything like them now? I’m also interested in this recording feature since recording for students has gotten so weird over the last 10 years or so!
Carolyn
There are actually a number of amazing 88 note weighted keyboards with phenomenal sounds and capabilities. But I am not aware of a similar instrument with real wooden keys like the Kurzweil K250. In its day it was a premier instrument. If you are interested in some of the state-of-the-art keyboards available today with similar features, there are great keyboards from Yamaha, Korg, Roland, Kurzweil, and others. Many of the workstation keyboards have extensive recording capabilities. More than that, any keyboard with a standard MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) output can interface with a personal computer for multi-track recording and score printing with appropriate software.
2 thoughts on “Piano Questions: A Great Digital Piano – The Kurzweil K250”
I also have a Kawai (a CA65) with Wooden Keys (apparently the same length as on their grand pianos). It also has a nice built in Rhodes sound and a few others, although probably less than 100. It’s built in recording facility is very limited, but I hope to hook it up to my laptop to experiment with recording, and other sounds. Also, I’m hoping to be able to have it play some piano accompaniment parts for when I practice my French Horn. However, most of the time, I just enjoy playing just with the main piano sound.
All the best, Martin
Hi Robert,
Thank you for your informative videos to the worldwide piano community.
On the subject of digital pianos with wooden keys, actually Kawai have used full wooden keyboards on most of their digital pianos for quite some time now. Their latest model of stage piano is called the MP10, which features this:
http://www.kawai.de/mp10_en.htm
They also have a range which uses a more standard plastic mechanism, I expect for cost-effectiveness.
Yamaha Clavinova and stage pianos use wooden keys but only for the white notes.
I missed out on experiencing the K250 – it wasn’t very common in the UK, and I’m a bit too young to know anyone that has one. However, the first digital piano I came across was a Roland HP-4500s, which used the same sound engine as their RD-1000s stage piano (which had wooden keys). I remember it with great fondness as it was incredibly expressive. It used a combination of sampling and synthesis (like physical modelling) to achieve this, and is a technique which Roland have gone back to in their latest digital pianos after 15 years of purely sampled instruments.
It’s really quite amazing to see how these digital instruments are getting closer to pianos, and being accepted by pianists as a viable alternative for a practice instrument. My own digital piano is a Yamaha CP300, and I have two grands- a Brodmann (which is overrated in my opinion) and a vintage Bluthner, which is beautiful. The digital piano is a good instrument for doing some of the ugly work that I don’t want to put my piano through, because you can play hard on it and it doesn’t affect the sound. Also, you can switch the touch response off and work purely on rhythm, using a very light finger touch. This I have found this to be a great advantage of the digital instruments, one that perhaps hasn’t been explored very often. Try it and see what you think! Of course, one needs to go back to the grand piano to really polish the playing, but every little helps!
Best wishes
Joseph