Circa-1985 digital piano sound

[hofflalu]

Listening to this weekend's "Casey Kasem's American Top 40: The '80s" from this week in 1985, the radio special had a couple songs with the same digital piano sound that I usually only heard around '85: Billy Joel's "The Night Is Still Young" and Night Ranger's "Four in the Morning (I Can't Take Any More)". Anyone know what keyboard produced that sound? (I can't imagine that was an acoustic with a lot of processing, but, perhaps I'm wrong!)

 

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[video:youtube]

[marczellm]

I think the Roland RD-1000 was very popular back then. Although the Roland site says that came out in '86.

[George88]

The low end on BJ tunes sounds acoustic, perhaps with some processing. Don"t Stop Believin" sounds incredibly proceed and I thought that was a real piano. I"m curious to know what those were. '85 was a tough year.

[MathOfInsects]

Wow.

 

Every once in a while I will force myself to reexamine my stance on Billy Joel, who I felt had maybe three good years of some careful, Carole King-like songwriting and then a decade and a half of bloated and bombastic unlistenability.

 

This reminder of his mid-80's sound, did not change that estimation in the least.

 

Holy cow.

 

Anyway. I think it's piano in the Joel tune and good old DX7 in Night Ranger, unless there's another keyboard in that one that I couldn't listen long enough to detect.

[Paolo Di Nicolantonio]

I think it's real acoustic piano, but they also layered and mixed in synthesizer parts on top of it

[bjosko]

Perhaps a layer between a half acoustic ( thinking Y CP70 here) and some digital?

[Mighty Motif Max]

The Billy Joel song is either a processed upright piano or a heavily processed CP70/CP80.

 

The Night Ranger song is almost certainly a CP70/80.

 

There was the Yamaha TX1P but that came out in 1987.

[Bill H.]

Squinting real hard, the Night Ranger video looks like a JX-8P above a DX7, but the audio sounds to me like a chorused CP70. I muted the Billy Joel song after the first few seconds - wow I can't believe he would put out something like that.

 

These are pretty lame examples from a year (1985) that actually had some decent singles: Walk of Life, Nightshift, Part Time Lover, Freeway of Love - and some great 80s cheese like Take On Me, Party All The Time

 

(List assembled with help - not from Peabody's Wayback machine, but Google Search)

[David Emm]

OT a bit... I have a ratty old cassette of "bus tape" hijinks, so named as pass-around fun for bands who were on long tour drives. Most of the content is pretty appalling, ahem. You'd be ashamed to laugh, but you probably would at a few points. Some of it is pretty creative, or at least back-stage funny. One segment features Casey cussing out an engineer during a break for making him follow a cute kitty story with a piece on a massive train wreck or the like. "Who in the **** thought making me ****ing follow a cute *** animal story with a **** nightmare like that was a good idea??? You need to *** think and earn your *** pay!!!"

 

I was once the keyboard-informed guy at a small music store, where they had a proper Roland floor plan, incl. the D-50 and the RD-1000. I sold an RD to a man who went mad for it, saying he'd been "waiting for this for a long time!" He had a Rhodes, but was jonesing for a proper e-version of the real thing. I loved the thing myself, so that sound will always be part of my piano kit.

[AnotherScott]

Sounds like CP70/CP80 to me.

[Baldwin Funster]

That Night Ranger song is OK. it's no Sister Christian though.

[Stokely]

Had to look up when the Roland MKS-20 was made (1986). We had one in the studio I learned engineering in, I had a love-hate relationship with it. We had a piano at least--no acoustic in that studio--easy to use in sequencing--but I never really liked the sound of it. Not sure how many pros used it on albums, but certainly it would have been very handy live.

 

Edit: I didn't realize this was basically the same as the RD-1000 in rack form.

 

Songs from this era are why every "bread and butter" keyboard have patches called "80s Stack" which is piano, some bright electric piano/cp70 sound, and usually a pad layered in.

[ElmerJFudd]

I remember the Korg SG-1D, highly desirable in 1987 - Korg had an ad with Keith Emerson next to the thing in the magazines.

Too pricey for me. I pumped a lot of gas, scrimped and saved - and then in 1988 got my hands on the Kurzweil K1000. Not a weighted action digital piano, but a pretty flexible semi weighted synth action and an acoustic piano sample that made me smile every time.

[Music Bird]

I agree about CP-70/80.

In the first maybe layered with a saw synth from what could be a Jupiter-8.

Second could be layered with a DX7.

Kurzweil K250 was from 1984 I think.

[elsongs]

The Billy Joel song sounds like a heavily processed acoustic piano. I know Billy hated digital pianos, plus your digital choices were extremely limited in the mid-'80s and none of them had the timbral expressivity of today's DPs.

 

The Night Ranger song, I can say with certainty was the E-mu Emulator II's "Pop Piano" sample. In the mid-'80s (and before the advent of the Korg M1) any non-acoustic/non-Yamaha CP piano on recordings and concert tours was either the Kurzweil K250 or the E-mu Emulator II. The Emulator II was a little more affordable than the K250 ($8K vs $12K) and the Kurzweil was MASSIVE, so unless you were Stevie Wonder who could afford one, plus a road crew to haul it around, the Emulator II was the preferred option for piano sounds then. The Pop Piano sample, one of the EII's factory sounds, was bright and cut in the mix. It wasn't very expressive timbrally (no sample layers due to limited sample memory; it was just a simple velocity-switched sample that used the internal filters for timbral variation, so it worked in rock settings along with guitars in the mix rather than as a solo or piano-centric arrangement.

 

Then in 1988 the Korg M1 came out and it was an even more affordable and portable (The EII was still pretty chunky for a 5-octave keyboard) and that became the digital piano sound of the late '80s/early '90s, in all it's tin-canny glory.

[Theo Verelst]

Making multitrack recordings often involves making layers and using effects to create a produced sound. Historically it's not been the major target to help cover bands easily create a 'perfect' copycat version. From some special persons pov I guess there are various instruments being used, obviously for instance guitar, and clearly there's chorus effect and pretty hard limiting, which makes the layered sound interesting.

 

T

[AnotherScott]

The Billy Joel song sounds like a heavily processed acoustic piano. I know Billy hated digital pianos, plus your digital choices were extremely limited in the mid-'80s and none of them had the timbral expressivity of today's DPs.

CP80/CP70 was not a digital piano, it was essentially a short-strung acoustic piano with pickups instead of a soundboard. And Billy Joel used it quite a bit. This track really sounds like the Yamaha to me.

 

Then in 1988 the Korg M1 came out and it was an even more affordable and portable (The EII was still pretty chunky for a 5-octave keyboard) and that became the digital piano sound of the late '80s/early '90s.

Before the M1, Roland did well with the MKS20 (RD1000).

[elsongs]

The Billy Joel song sounds like a heavily processed acoustic piano. I know Billy hated digital pianos, plus your digital choices were extremely limited in the mid-'80s and none of them had the timbral expressivity of today's DPs.

CP80/CP70 was not a digital piano, it was essentially a short-strung acoustic piano with pickups instead of a soundboard. And Billy Joel used it quite a bit. This track really sounds like the Yamaha to me.

 

Yes I know that. Nowhere did I ever claim that the Yamaha CP70/80 was a digital piano. They are electric grands.