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As a beginner, it’s not really realistic for you to get your hands on a grand piano – well, at least not until you’re filthy rich. Even that put aside, it’s always better to start with a digital piano if you’ve planning to buy one. Not only are they easy on the pockets but they also come with a couple of cool features like metronome, play along tracks, MIDI, USB/XLR inputs, and are also portable so you can easily take them to your music classes. In this article, we’ve compiled a list of the best digital pianos for beginners in 2021, as well as a detailed buying guide that’ll fill you in on everything you need to know about making a purchase that’s reliable and offers ample room for growth!
The Alesis Recitation 88-Key Keyboard is an excellent beginner digital piano, offering fine sound, a durable build, and has a compact design. It comes with full-sized, semi-weighted keys and adjustable touch response to match your playing technique!
Moreover, you get 5 premium voices, reverb & chorus, and powerful 20-watt speakers. It also comes with Skoove, featuring in-depth piano courses online!
Equipped with 88 half-weighted hammer keys, this digital piano does an excellent job at simulating the feel of playing a real acoustic piano. It comes loaded with sounds of 8 instruments that gives you a whole lot of room for your creative freedom.
The Donner DEP-10 comes with a metronome with 4 types of beats, effect control for DSP/suspension, and recording mode for storing/playing/arranging the music. It has two built-in 25W speakers, an MP3 player, and an excellent design, giving you an unrivaled playing experience!
The best part about this keyboard is that you can buy it in different variations; 49-key, 54-key, 61-key, and 88-key! It has velocity-sensitive keys, closely replicating the feel of an actual piano, making this one a delight to play!
It comes with 24-watts stereo speakers, a headphone and USB input, and ten unique voices. It also comes with an aux input so you will not have to wander around looking for XLR-to-Aux input converters as it usually occurs!
Plixio’s 61-key keyboard is lightweight and portable, making it a great first musical instrument! It features 100 rhythms, 60 demo songs, 40 tones, 8 percussions and volume or tempo control. Since it has a dual-power supply, you can customize the sounds and play along on the go!
It doesn’t come with a USB port but has an input for mic, enabling you to have the most fun-filled karaoke nights! The pack includes a music sheet stand, power adapter, and an aux cable.
Since you’ve now got your hands on a couple of excellent digital pianos for beginners that you can order anytime, it’s important that you know what exactly you’re looking for when buying one. This section will help you achieve the exact confidence you need to make that flawless purchase. Let’s start with the basics!
There are some advantages a digital piano has over the grand one, some of them are as follows, and more:
So, first of all, a digital piano is portable. You can take it anywhere you intend to with little-to-no effort. If you’re planning to grow as a musician and dreaming of playing live in front of an audience, you’ll need a digital piano by your side so you’re not clueless what to do at the very last minute. Since you’re probably a beginner, you’ll appreciate the convenience a digital piano will provide you – you can easily take it to your class every day!
A lot of digital pianos out there come with USB compatibility so you can connect it with all kinds of audio gear without a hassle! Similarly, there are digital pianos with MIDI that allow you to connect it to computers/recording gear. There are models that come up with the option to plug in memory cards and flash drives to play music from them as well as record and transfer. There’s really a lot of room and cool features to play around.
The recording/playback feature is really cool when you’re learning and want to see how well you’ve been progressing. These aren’t world-class recordings but good enough for you to extract enough benefit from them.
The digital pianos nowadays come with LED lights that can explain different chord placements. This can be highly beneficial if you’re a teacher or you’ve got a small kid who wants to learn to play the piano. Makes things really simple!
Of course, the cost-benefit is unrivaled. You can get an 88-key piano within a very good budget. When you’re buying beginner pianos, you can get them for as low as $100!
Since you’re now on top of the primary benefits of a digital piano, here’s what you need to consider when buying one:
If you’re a music producer, playing for years, have your grip on a couple of instruments, your primary instrument is a piano, and you end up buying a beginner digital piano, that’s obviously going to do you no good – unless you’re looking for it specifically to engineer your craft in a specific way.
If we’re being real, an experienced music producer will never do such a thing unless they absolutely need it. However, a beginner can definitely end up spending thousands on an instrument only to later find out that he/she isn’t really interested in the instrument anymore. So, when buying a digital piano, you need to buy a relevant product that does not only match your level of expertise when it comes to playing but also gives you ample room to grow and to take a regret-free decision of backing out if you need to!
If you’re an absolute beginner, we’ll suggest that you start with a learner’s piano that’ll help you get a grip on the basics rather quickly.
So, the touch response refers to the action of your piano, determining how hard or how lightly you have to press the keys to get your desired sound. In other words, it refers to ‘the harder your press the keys, the louder is the sound’ and ‘the softer you press them, the quieter is the sound’. If you’re getting the same sound both ways, that’s just poor playing technique and the sound doesn’t really hit where it’s supposed to.
Digital pianos have the sounds of actual grand pianos recorded against each key – so what you’re getting is actually a recorded sound. You need to make sure the sound you get closely mimics the sound of acoustic instruments – this generally happens when you have a digital piano with ample memory that can afford sounds with higher sample rates. The quality of the amplifier and speaker also greatly affects the sound you get.
The number of keys is important – 88 is the ideal number to go for but you can also make do with 64 keys, 61 keys, and even 54 in some scenarios.
As we’ve explained above, digital pianos come with learning tools and whether you’re a teacher or a learner, you can extract good benefit out of this feature! So, when you’re buying a digital keyboard, don’t forget to understand the type of learning tools it comes with.
The price for digital pianos for beginners usually starts at around $100 and goes as high as $200. More often than not, you can get an excellent 88-keys piece in the $100 - $150 range.
And if you’ve evolved from the beginner phase, it’s safe to say that only the sky is the limit when it comes to the price of musical instruments!
A: Well, to begin with, your power supply may become faulty. If there's an LCD screen on your piano, it may break. Some pianos have low-quality keys and they may start causing hiccups after a while. The last one is probably the most frustrating one but don't worry, there's no issue that your local music store can't fix.
A: A digital piano that's advertised for having a hammer action is the closest you can get to an acoustic piano. The conversation then narrows down on how closely the said digital piano imitates the hammer action to feel and sound exactly like an acoustic one!