Ken's Keyboard Page
I have completed a bit of web research in the process of buying my keyboard and want to share some of the interesting sites I found.
First, there are a couple of general, one-stop-shopping sites. These are good places to start:
Since many synth and keyboard players are also computer savvy, it was little surprise to find a lot of valuable opinions and advice from the Usenet newsgroups rec.music.makers.synth and rec.music.makers.piano. Fire a question their way and you'll might get a quick and insightful response. However, as with all Usenet newsgroups, your mileage may vary. Perhaps a better path to this information (at least it is for me) is to execute a search at Deja News.
Piano players will want to check out The Piano Page and the Piano FAQ Locator page.
MW's Keyboard Page is another list of links which includes keyboards in the piano, organ, and accordion families.
For the phone number of just about any company in the music business, check out the Musician's Yellow Pages. Items are arranged alphabetically by company name (e.g. Roland) and product category (e.g. foot switches) and include phone and fax numbers as well as web and email addresses.
If you are thinking about making a purchase and would like some price estimates, check out:
If you must buy mail order, my favorite store is our local Woodwind and Brasswind, where I recently purchased my Fatar 90C and Kurzweil MicroPiano. They know their stuff and have great prices. I've also heard good things about Caruso Music, but don't have any first hand experiences to relate.
By the way, I could not be any happier with my Fatar and MicroPiano. Without a doubt, the best digital piano combo around for the money (I paid just over $1000 for the two of them). I play mostly the acoustic piano (which is the highlight of the MicroPiano), but the strings, organs, and electric pianos are all very useable, some of them are even great. Check out the Kurzweil discussion forum. The Fatar is a no-frills 88 key, hammer-action controller. It lacks after-touch, both pitch-bend and modulation wheels, and other bells and whistles that you would see on most pro-quality controllers. However as a pianist, I�hardly use those features, and saved over $250 (which I'm using to buy a nice airline-ready case) over the Fatar 900C, their standard controller with all the extras mentioned above. Just my (somewhat informed) opinion.
There is an amazing amount of information and examples of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) on the Web. A good place to start is The MIDI Homepage. There you'll find a good introduction to MIDI�as well as links to many of the other MIDI hot spots on the Web. Other MIDI links:
Questions, corrections,
opinions can be had by emailing me at [email protected].
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Ken's Keyboard Page by Ken Laberteaux . Copyright 1997.