Yamaha P250 Digital Piano
This is a beautiful digital piano recreating the piano sound amazingly well - it also features a huge array of other sounds, and acts as the controller keyboard for the studio.
Review - Keyboard Magazine August 2005
http://www.keyboardmag.com/article/yamaha-p250/aug-05/11876
Overview
Don't you love that unmistakable feeling of sitting down at a gorgeous Bosendorfer or Hamburg Steinway and thinking that it could be an amazing instrument for that next gig? At least until reality sets in and you realize you're short a couple hundred G's, a road crew, and a professional tuner. Thank goodness for electronic stage pianos, instruments that seek to give a similar experience, but with superior portability, lower cost, and lots of nifty features to boot.
Sit down at the Yamaha P250, turn up the built-in speakers, close your eyes, and feel the piano envy slip away. A solid, fun, all-in-one instrument, the P250 combines a well-crafted piano action with excellent sounds, a 16-track sequencer, and MIDI controller capabilities.
Touch
The P250's weighted action - essentially the same as that of its predecessor, the P200, as well as the speakerless P90 - does a very good job of mimicking the feel of a quality acoustic instrument. San Francisco composer, keyboardist, and Keyboard contributor Richard Leiter likened the feel of the P250 more to Yamaha's larger Clavinova series, as well as their acoustic pianos, than to other portable stage pianos. "It feels like a Yamaha grand," he told me. "I couldn't improve on it." I came to agree with Richard after running the P250 through its paces. Whether I was breaking out percussive stride piano, a quiet jazz ballad, or a section from Bach's Italian Concerto, the action consistently felt satisfyingly deep and organic.
While the P250's touch is excellent in many regards, it does fall on the heavy side, compared to other dedicated stage pianos such as the Roland RD-700SX and the M-Audio Keystation Pro 88. While the beefiness of the touch was a definite plus for me, it's something to keep in mind for players whose fingers might be more accustomed to lighter-playing electric instruments than acoustic pianos. More on that later.
Sounds, Editing, and Sequencing
Yamaha's acoustic piano sounds shine on the P250, delivering a surprisingly wide range of volume and expressiveness. And most of the other sounds are hot enough to keep you glued to the keys (an excellent phased-Clavinet sound prompted a spontaneous "Now that's what I'm talking about!" from technical editor Ken Hughes). Sound category and variation buttons make the basic 45 sounds easily accessible, while under the "XG" button lies an extended set of 480 General MIDI tones, provided by a sound engine similar to that found in Yamaha's MU modules. Rather than having to press the "variation" buttons 200-something times to find a desired sound, hitting both "variation +" and "variation -" at the same time lets you browse by category, which is really nice. Still, the ability to twirl a knob and quickly scroll through patches would have been a useful feature.
Thirty-two preset performance combinations are included in the P250, and it's also easy enough to create and store your own performance splits and layered combinations, complete with customizable EQ, reverb levels, and velocity curves. The P250 also features an intuitive on-board 16-track sequencer, which proved an excellent resource for capturing musical ideas as quickly as they came to me. Cool features include quantization and re-recording sections of tracks, though the sequencer doesn't give the user the ability to cut, paste, transpose individual tracks or sections, or perform event list edits. As a musical scratch pad, the P250 does a fine job, but experienced sequencers may well miss extended editing features.
Speakers
One of the P250's biggest strengths is its gutsy pair of built in 30-watt speakers. Fidelity is strong: High piano notes come out clean and vibrant, even at full volume, and the lowest notes played on electric bass patches are satisfyingly full and resonant. Though it's not going to fill stadiums, there's plenty of power for solo and small ensemble gigs, rehearsal studios, and even quieter clubs. And if you do decide to use external amplification, it's a simple matter to either leave the on-board speakers pumping and use them as monitors, or switch them off entirely.
Just for kicks, I went through all of the P250's patches, playing hard on the keyboard with the internal speakers blasting at full volume. Even under such abuse, the instrument performed admirably, delivering clean, powerful sound, with only a single ethnic string XG tone (out of more than 400) creating mild distortion. Not too shabby.
In Use
I spent a good deal of time with the P250 practicing, sequencing, and recording the audio and MIDI files of Muse's "Ruled by Secrecy," as transcribed in the June issue of Keyboard. First off, I found it hard to get down to work; fresh out of its flight case, the P250 was accessible and playable enough an instrument to get my fingers moving and my creative juices flowing whenever I sat down to it. Wah-wah Clavinet and retro theatre organ patches were the two biggest, most fun time-wasters on there. The easily-split keyboard and the tone combinations it allowed didn't help my efficiency either. Great for the composer/improviser part of my brain, if not the magazine editor one.
Jamming out (with a little work thrown in) I found that the resonance provided by the built-in speakers added considerably to the P250's fun-to-play quotient. Those accustomed to acoustic instruments will appreciate the way the instrument rumbles and vibrates in response to their playing. We're not talking earthquake-level disturbances here - just some nice resonance to remind you that you're playing an instrument, not an appliance.
The acoustic piano sound itself was a real treat, regardless of whether I played it through the onboard speakers, the Genelec monitors in the Keyoard studio, or the Alesis and Barbetta combo amps we had available. The electric piano sounds are impressive as well, but they feel more suited for ballads than hard-driving rock or pop settings. "They're very pretty," commented Richard. "And they're more serious. The Roland RD-700SX electric sounds are more fun."
In comparing the P250 against other boards, it became obvious that "weighted action" can mean very different things coming from different manufacturers. The RD-700SX, for example, had a bouncier feel that Richard and I liked best for playing pop electric piano sounds. If you're used to playing acoustic grand pianos, chances are you'll dig the feel of the P250 right away, but if you've recently logged most of your time on boards with a lighter touch, some getting-to-know-you time at your local music store is highly recommended.
Conclusions
The P250 is an expressive, intuitive instrument that will delight many players. If a truly acoustic feel is what you're after, and you can haul this reasonably hefty axe, it's worth a serious look. The built-in speakers and ease of use also make it a strong candidate for technological newbies, players who gig in smaller venues, and folks who just don't want to deal with external amplifiers. Not to say the P250 won't find a home with touring pros - many road warriors will continue to favor it for its mix of authentic piano mimicry and relative portability.
If a stage piano with built-in speakers is truly what you're after, you might also consider laying your fingers on the slimmer Casio Previa PX300 and the Roland FP-5 as part of your search, though the P250's combination of power and quality sound will be hard to top. And if internal speakers aren't that big a deal, the RD-700SX also presents an appealing package - see Keyboard's April '05 issue for a full review.
With strong piano sounds, touch, and amplification, I think the P250 lives up to Yamaha's claims. If you're in the market for a stage piano, be sure to give this one a whirl and see if it doesn't make that piano envy disappear.
