The Difference Between a Piano and a Keyboard

Piano is a keyboard instrument, but not all keyboards are pianos.

A keyboard:

1. Has a soft touch keyboard. This means that the keys don’t require you to apply a lot of force.
2. Are velocity sensitive. The faster your press the keys, the louder the sound. This is how you control dynamics.
3. Has a lot of instrument voices, including the piano. However, the piano sound is not very authentic when compared to the real one. But it’s excellent for popular music likes blues, jazz and rock.
4. Normally has 61 keys.

A piano, on the other hand:

1. Has a weighted hammer action keyboard. The keys are harder to press in the bass area, and the resistance decreases as you move up. This is because we have hammers in a real piano. A digital piano also has a similar mechanism under the keys to give the same feel as a real piano.
2. The sound is as close as you can get to the real piano. The sound of a piano is sampled at different volume levels. Depending on how fast you press, the appropriate sample is used. All the samples are linearly morphed to give a wide dynamic range.
3. They normally have less instrument voices. But they almost always include the strings and bass. You won’t need other voices, since they sound quite terrible anyway.
4. Normally has 88 keys.

If you ever want to learn a piano in the future, then you should probably get a digital piano (like the Yamaha P155, which seems to have a nice offer going on in Amazon). This will allow you to develop a proper technique for piano playing. You need not upgrade to an acoustic piano in the future either, you could just get a higher end digital piano. Digital pianos are good when you have space problems, and don’t want to deal with the maintenance that an acoustic piano requires.

If you’re just looking for a keyboard, you could buy something like the Yamaha DGX-230. As opposed to 61 keys, it has 76 keys. However, it still qualifies as a keyboard. From what I’ve researched, it seems to be a very good keyboard.

I’m normally not so inclined towards Casio pianos because I’ve seen a lot of negative reviews online regarding their build quality. The keys seem to be plasticky, make a lot of noise, and their hammer mechanism wears off soon. I read about this when I was researching their Privia series. It seems to me that the Privia series is not the only one plaguaed with this problem.

However, that doesn’t mean all Casio keyboards are bad. But you might want to check out reviews on Amazon and other sites like Piano World before you commit to something. The Yamaha P155 that I mentioned is considered to be a very good digital piano for the price. Excellent build quality and sound (uses 4 levels of dynamic sampling, even better than the lower end Clavinovas).