Stage Piano
Yamaha’s new flagship stage piano is unashamedly
specialist and expensive. How does it rank alongside the best sampled
and modelled alternatives, or indeed the original instruments it strives
to emulate?
The CP1’s main panel and keyboard, elegantly offset with a ’70s-style tolex finish.
The introduction of
Roland’s V-Piano last year redefined just how much could be spent on a
stage piano, and Yamaha’s new CP1 slots right into that same big-money
market. With its 88-note ‘NW-STAGE’ hammer-action wooden keyboard and
chunky 42cm depth, it’s certainly imposing and, at around 28kg, quite a
struggle for one person to handle. The construction is top class, and
the main front-panel controls — 40 shallow push-buttons plus a
centrally mounted 2 x 55 character fluorescent display and six
accompanying ‘soft’ knobs — ooze cool, confident style. It comes with a
chunky three-pedal floor unit, manuals and a software DVD including
the Cubase AI DAW application.
At the back of
the CP1 are all the usual suspects: a three-pin IEC mains connector,
power switch, MIDI In, Out and Thru sockets, and a type-B USB socket
for easy connection to a computer. There are no less than six pedal
inputs, of which three are meant to accommodate plugs from the supplied
pedal unit. Audio emerges on pairs of quarter-inch jack and male XLR
sockets, to allow for balanced and unbalanced operation. One more tiny
switch, quite tricky to find, switches on illumination of the back
panel’s big Yamaha logo — very bling!
The CP1’s
sounds come courtesy of Yamaha’s SCM (Spectral Component Modelling)
system, and a list of them can be found in the ‘A Lizst Or Two’ box over
the page.
Performance-oriented
The
CP1 ships with 48 preset ‘Performances’, effectively patches that
showcase nicely all the instrument has to offer. You call these up with
16 dedicated number buttons and three bank buttons, and a further 48 of
your own performances go in a dedicated User area. If you need more,
so-called ‘External’ groups of 48 Performances can be saved to and
loaded from a memory stick plugged into the front-panel socket.
To
understand what makes up a Performance, we need to look at the CP1’s
architecture. Two separate but concurrent ‘Parts’ each consist of four
blocks: piano, preamplifier, modulation effect and
power-amplifier/compressor. The two parts then pass through a single
shared reverb and the master equaliser. Front-panel buttons, to the left
of the central display, allow you to turn individual blocks on and off,
and if you hold them down for a second any associated parameters are
called up on the central display. A further two parts, not directly
accessible from the front panel, are dedicated to controlling external
MIDI devices, and all four parts can be combined through layering,
keyboard splits or by being assigned specific key ranges. Playback
pitch, pitch-bend range, velocity response, real-time controller
assignments and other settings can be made on a per-part basis.
Player Perspective
A
series of front-panel buttons neatly demonstrate the CP1’s internal
sound production architecture. Some will wonder, though, if a dedicated
piano instrument really gains much the dual-part, split/layer
capability.
So far I’ve stuck mostly to the facts, but stage
pianos are (or should be) about feel, response and vibe, so here’s my
take on the CP1, speaking as a player. I appreciate that piano touch
and sound is a decidedly subjective business, so I’ve tried to be as
balanced and philosophical as I can be. Still, I’d urge you to take the
following comments as a guide only, and to try out the CP1 for
yourself.
The NW-STAGE undoubtedly has a good
keyboard action. The key tops are very slightly textured, and the weight
and speed are well judged for stage use. I feel it’s best suited to
rock and pop-oriented playing, and works great with the electric pianos.
For classical repertoire, it seems too light, and lacks that sense of
long-key ‘swing’. By comparison, my own Yamaha U30A upright’s action is
still markedly more tactile and communicative, and a modern acoustic
grand would obviously represent a further step up. Significantly,
NW-STAGE has no obvious escapement ‘notch’ on the downstroke, and as I
investigated this I was surprised to find that no matter how slowly
you push down a key, a sound is still triggered, albeit very quietly.
Some players might find this a good thing; I thought it was an
unconvincing departure from reality.
But what
about the sound? Diving in with the two acoustic models was initially a
really positive and enjoyable experience. Both the CFIIIS and S6B have
plenty of colour and life, the former classy and respectable and the
latter more ballsy and suited to jazz and pop. Yamaha have got the top
end of the dynamic response spot on, so that even when you’re already
playing loud, laying in with more energy results in a convincing,
natural surge in tone quality and dynamic that seems to go on and on.
The way the sound builds smoothly and naturally is really impressive,
and is thanks, no doubt, to the modelling-based approach. However, I
liked the bottom end of the touch range nowhere near as much. Quiet
playing resulted in the sound seeming to become anaemic and puny, rather
than silky but still very present, as with a real acoustic piano.
Also, I don’t rate the quality of the decay phase, for either acoustic
model. Play a chord at a medium to loud dynamic level, and the first
second or so is perfectly believable. Wait longer, though, and the sound
becomes rather static and plasticky, a touch too reminiscent of
memory-starved workstation keyboard pianos. I also found pedal
resonance unrealistic — at least there is a difference when you play a
note or chord with the pedal down, but to me it sounds for all the
world like it’s going through a cheap reverb unit, having a kind of
rhythmic, ringing character.
Moving to the
electric pianos, I felt the CP1 came into its own. The Wurlitzers and
CP80/88 are fantastic, but the various Rhodes models are even better.
With these, the CP1 offers a level of involvement that I’ve rarely
experienced in any other electronic instrument, and many Performances
that include suitable effects and amp/speaker emulation are totally
convincing, in the way that a good real instrument is — you just get on
and play it, exploring its musical capabilities, rather than thinking
about how it might be improved with a parameter tweak. Every Rhodes
model is enjoyable in its own right, ranging from the 71RdI’s thick
warmth to the 78RdII’s willing bark.
The DX
sounds are also absolutely authentic, and noodling with them is
testament to their ability to recall the excesses of early ’80s pop!
Still, they’ll be a useful inclusion for players working in some
genres.
The modulation effects — phasers,
flangers, chorus and wah — are all fit for purpose, and work a treat on
the electric piano sounds. You can only have one per part, though, and
both the ‘SmallPha’ and ‘Max90’ phasers cause the acoustic pianos (the
CP1’s only truly stereo pianos) to go mono. Amp and speaker modelling
gives useful character and coherence to the electric pianos, but you
can’t achieve a really thick overdrive and, annoyingly, it can’t be
used at all with the acoustics.
Further
inconsistencies revolve around the electric pianos’ preamp block. What
Yamaha call ‘vibrato’ is actually a square-wave type auto-pan for the
Rhodes models, and for the Wurlitzers a tremolo, which is fair enough.
However, these characteristics are absolutely fixed — you can’t get
auto-pan on a Wurlitzer, for example — and what’s worse is that the
tremolo speed is fixed. All far too restrictive. Worse still, the CP1’s
sound output is disrupted momentarily by adjusting various parameters,
such as the tone controls for the CP80/88, 78RdII and Dyno, or by
switching some Performance blocks on or off. That’s bad enough, but it’s
downright perverse that you can assign expression pedal control to some
of the same parameters. That just allows you to have messed-up audio
under pedal control!
The three ‘Rich’ reverb
algorithms are distinctly average, and MIDI control features are
disappointing in practice. The two external MIDI ‘parts’, whose
parameters are hidden away in the programming system, are hard-wired to
transmit on channels three and four, and it’s an either/or situation as
to whether you use USB MIDI or the five-pin DIN sockets — you can’t have
both. With virtually no front-panel controls dedicated to MIDI use, the
CP1 feels basic in a master keyboard role, despite a fair degree of
programmability if you have the time and inclination.
Magnum Opus?
The
CP1’s rear panel. All of the unit’s connections are found here, with
the exception of the headphone port and a handy USB memory slot located
above the right-hand end of the keyboard.
I was excited to get my hands on the CP1, and I
tried hard to like it. It certainly looks the part, and it must be said
that it can feel and sound it too. Ultimately, though, I came away less
impressed than I thought I’d be.
It boils
down, I think, to what you might call price/performance ratio. There’s
no question that the electric piano sounds are fabulous. Despite my
specific reservations about them, the acoustics are also very playable
and usable, and will sound excellent on stage or in a mix. But this
thing has a price of $6000, and the problem is
that fabulous electric pianos and stage-worthy acoustics can be had for
much less money (the ‘Alternatives’ box singles out some serious
contenders that are around half the price). Deep, V-Piano-like
editability could have sweetened the pill, but it isn’t there. Nor are a
wide range of sounds that arguably would have been more useful than
the DX pianos — clavinet, harpsichord, vibes, an upright or two, a good
honky-tonk, dedicated mono piano sounds... the list goes on. A
smattering of string, pad and bass sounds would have added so much, and
made much more sense of the split/layer Performance architecture. As it
stands, that feels somewhat redundant. The irony is that the CP1’s
cheaper sibling, the CP5, retains all the key SCM pianos, has the
NW-STAGE keyboard, includes a big sampled sound set and a sequencer,
and has arguably more useful front-panel controls. You get far more for
about half the money, which makes me think something fishy is going on.
Perhaps the CP1 was (or is) destined for greater things, but there’s no
sign of that currently.
No comments:
Post a Comment