🎹Electric vs Digital Pianos: What's the Difference & What You Should Know🎹

Popul;ar Digital Pianos

#ElectricPiano #DigitalPiano #Piano

Hello again, and welcome to the Merriam Pianos YouTube channel. In this video we’ll tackle one of the most common questions among folks shopping for a piano: what is the difference between an electric piano and a digital piano?

Are these two things really just the same? Does it matter which one you shop for? If you’ve been asking yourself questions like this, you’ve come to the right place.

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Background

While both digital pianos and electric pianos both use electricity, they’re most definitely not the same thing. If you’re shopping for a piano in 2020 that runs on electricity, it’s a near certainty that you’re shopping for a digital piano. An electric piano is something else entirely.

Electric Pianos

Electric pianos as they’re defined in the music business is a piano that uses an analogue electric component to pick up or amplify the sound generated by a string or other metallic object. If you think of an electric guitar, this is a perfect comparison, i.e. a string’s vibration being picked up and amplified via a guitar amplifier.

With pianos, electric pianos were very popular in the 1970’s, and were very common on Motown, R&B, Pop and Jazz fusion records. What made them electric and not digital? Well quite literally, the lack of digits. While there were electric signals floating around, none of them were being converted into 1’s and 0’s, which is a basic requirement to call something a digital device.

Digital Pianos

Digital pianos generate sound in one of three ways. The first way is by replaying a sample of a real instrument that’s been digitally stored. The second way is by generating different pitches based on a single PCM shape, which is essentially how general MIDI sounds work. The third method which is gaining in popularity is modeling - real time algorithmic synthesis. All three methods use circuits and microprocessors to create sounds based on a set of instructions when the player’s finger plays a note, versus a key causing a hammer to strike some type of metallic object or surface as with electric pianos.

What Should I Be Looking For?

Unless you’re a professional performer or vintage instrument enthusiast, you’re almost certainly looking for a digital piano. Digital pianos have dramatically improved in quality while coming down in price over the last 10 years, and in the last 2 or 3 years, there’s now several instruments on the market in the $500 USD price range that can provide a solid musical experience to take your first lessons on.

We hope this video was helpful. Thank you for watching!

Connect with Merriam Music:

[thorn]

In less than four minutes, you cleared up a lot of confusion—very important, since words/terms matter. Thank you for the work you do!

[mediumsizedgrape]

Love the effort you guys put in your videos!

[ganeshzv]

I recently bought a YDP-164, extremely happy with the purchase. Thank you for all your videos and comparisons, they have been of immense help in making a decision.

[Jextt]

Once I go off to university I need to get a digital piano, Time to binge all your vids:)

[raeeskabir]

Great video just ordered the Roland RP102 from you guys. So excited!

[SeleDreams]

I expected some audio comparisons rather than only describing them

[Trombonauta]

Indeed, we usually mistake the words "digital" and "electronic", and they are not synonyms. You could build an analogue electronic piano. Indeed, I guess early synthetisers could be considered as such.

[zenolord]

Haha it was quite funny looking this up on google, reading the top result, then watchng this video and hearing the exact same sentences, good video but a more original script would be nice. :)

[TheGODcc]

Guys help me please. I am going to buy Yamaha ydp-164 and I am waiting for delivery it to the
store now. And I have time to change my mind. Maybe you know better variant of piano in this price range?

[Simonchez]

Less than a minute in, you confuse "electric" piano with "electronic" piano. Not great.