(Source: Yamaha Europe)

Jools Holland, one of the UK’s most popular pianists, has put his tour piano, a Yamaha GT7 digital piano, on auction. It’ll be auctioned at the Bonhams’ Autumn sale of Fine Pianos without reserve, and all proceeds will go towards the Drake Music Project.

FYI, production of this particular Yamaha GT7 model has been discontinued, so you’ll be getting a potential antique as well. On a related note, Holland has announced that he will be replacing this piano with a “similar upgraded model”.

[News via Yamaha Europe]

(Read the whole post…)

(Source: Gibson)

Yamaha recently launched the Clavinova CLP-240PE - a mid-level digital piano which few will find particularly striking bar one aspect. It will come with what Yamaha calls “…a high end, polished ebony finish…” - something it claims doesn’t come too often with mid-range models.

While not untrue, I find it rather ludicrous to make it a key selling point of a digital piano (at least, that’s what Yamaha seems to be doing). But let’s forget about that and return to more solid stuff.

The CLP-240PE, like the rest of its CLP-200-series brethren, comes with two key “technologies” (you know, the ones with all the fancy names and acronyms). One: Advanced Wave Memory (AWM) tone generation for instrument realism. Two: Dynamic Stereo Sampling (DSS) piano samples which allow for subtly different sounds when you hit the keys differently.

Overall, Yamaha’s latest Clavinova-series piano looks good, and sounds good specs-wise. But it really isn’t very different from other digital pianos in its class - except for that “high-end ebony-finish”, of course.

(Read the whole post…)

(Source: Behringer)

Well, if you were looking for a quality digital alternative to an acoustic piano, the recently introduced Behringer EG8080 should help satisfy your needs. It’s supposed to be an easy-to-use digital piano that not only incorporates an 88-key, concert grand-class, weighted hammer-action keyboard but also requires no manual effort to maintain, i.e. no traditional tuning or maintainance.

Each Behringer EG8080 comes with 80-Watt speakers, stereo sampling Real Sound Memory (RSM) tone generation, 14 high-quality voices with 64-note polyphony, a real-time 2-track song recorder, 3 pedals (Damper, Sostenuto and Soft), as well as MIDI In/Out/Thru and stereo line in/out connectors. An impressive feature set indeed, but the one song capacity of the on-board song recorder is disappointing (at least to me).

Overall, the Eurogrand EG8080 looks like another quality German digital piano, which should not disappoint most pianists out there.

[News via Sonic State]

(Read the whole post…)