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Travel piano: best action under 1m (39.5")?


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Thanks for suggesting the Dexibell S1, but it's too long (39.5" is a hard limit; I already have a Yamaha P-121 which is 43" and does not fit into my car) and semi-weighted is a compromise I cannot live with.

 

But I'll consider the A1-E7 range.

(there are so many note names: in this notation middle C is C4).

 

So now the question is: what keys are more important?

1) F1 and G1 (Contra octave); or

2) D7 and E7 (4-Line octave)

 

I would go with the A1-E7 range.

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Yes, that's what I'm doing now (see my previous posts).

However, this costs me about $200 in extra fuel per year, so I'm not sure it's cheaper in the long run.

Besides, a car with a roof box screams "tourist", and there's places where I'd prefer the car to go unnoticed.

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@OP Can I ask: who have you found to custom-chop your controller?

Cheers, Mike.

Mike,

it's www.keyboardmanufaktur.de

They don't chop _my_ controller, but you can order a controller with a custom-chopped Fatar keybed.

Let me know by PM in case you need more info (the site is mostly in German).

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I would go with the A1-E7 range.

Just personal preference or any particular reasons?

 

Besides, I've downloaded some MIDI collections of classical piano pieces and ran some stats on it, to see which notes are more frequently used.

Overall (over 2200 pieces and 9 million notes), the lower range F1-G#1 is used more frequently than the higher range C#7-E7 by about 2-3 times, depending on the collection.

It then also depends on the composer. A few examples:

- Mozart, whose piano had the F1-F6 range, obviously only used the F1-G#1 notes (about 30 times out of 135000)

- Beethoven and Chopin also used the lower range more than the higher.

- Albeniz and Czerny used the higher range more.

 

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I would go with the A1-E7 range.

Just personal preference or any particular reasons?

 

 

Just a personal preference. I had the Roland RD-64 and liked that it had low "A". Actually the ideal range for me would be C1-E7 (77 keys?) but it would be too big for your purposes.

Seriously though, short of finding a used VMK-161, I'd just find a way to fit Yamaha P121/Studiologic 73 in the car - like putting it vertically on the floor, folding seats, etc.

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Just a personal preference. I had the Roland RD-64 and liked that it had low "A". Actually the ideal range for me would be C1-E7 (77 keys?) but it would be too big for your purposes.

Seriously though, short of finding a used VMK-161, I'd just find a way to fit Yamaha P121/Studiologic 73 in the car - like putting it vertically on the floor, folding seats, etc.

Thanks for the advice: that would be certainly the most sensible solution. However, when I'm going on vacation with my family, I need all the seats, so the roof box is presently the only solution.

A Studiologic 73 does not fit only for a few cm, unfortunately.

Also, the custom controller has become a sort of DIY project: I plan to build in speakers, an amplifier, and a battery pack, together with a dock for an iPhone (playing the soundfonts), so I can use it as stage piano.

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I ran some stats on the MIDI collections, this time looking at the frequency distribution of the lowest and highest notes. In other words, for each piece, I determined the lowest and highest note, and then plotted how often they appear. I've done this for all about 2000 pieces, and hand-picked some composers for which I had at least about 25-30 pieces. The results are summarised in the graph below.

Click on the image for a full-size, readable image.

Synoptic-Graphs-sm.png

 

According to these stats, and for what it's worth, there are more piano pieces that use F1-G#1 as lowest notes than C#7-E7 as highest notes, so I might opt for the lower range.

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OK. I did the last piece of the analysis and managed to convince myself that what I've codenamed the "Mozart++68" range (F1-C7) is preferable to the "Dexibell68" range (A1-E7).

I've gone through my MIDI files and checked what percentage of them I'd be able to play with either range.

I then also plotted the difference.

With a few exceptions, F1-C7 covers more pieces than A1-E7.

Playable-songs-summary.png

 

It would be interesting to run this analysis on larger collections.

In case you have large collections of MIDI files for piano and you'd like to contribute, please contact me via PM.

 

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I noticed a small mistake in the first histogram (Grand Total, i.e., all composers) of the graph with the piano ranges above: the scale of the horizontal axis is not the same as for the other graphs, so that F1 was excluded.

Here is the corrected graph:

Synoptic-Graphs-v2-sm.png

 

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