Yamaha Disklavier Piano: What is it? How does it work? How do you use it?

What is it?

Quite simply put, a Yamaha Disklavier is a self-playing piano! The keys move by themselves whilst you sit back and enjoy the show! This piano took 30 years to develop and is brilliant for restaurants, reception areas and your own home! Pianists and composers will also love the fact that you can record yourself playing on the disklavier and then listen to the piano play your music back to you. Disklavier pianos can also connect with other Disklaviers across the world making them a fantastic resource for education!

How does it work?

You're probably wondering how on earth the keys move up and down by themselves! Well everything that works to make this happen can be found underneath the piano action. Little pointy electromagnets called Solenoids push each individual key upwards so that the hammers hit the strings and produce the sound! When you record yourself playing on the Disklavier, the piano knows exactly what to play back to you because there are sensors beneath the keys converting your playing to MIDI data. There are even pedal and hammer sensors to pick up every nuance of your playing, along with key attack and release to replicate a performance as accurately as possible. Amazingly, the electronic sensors can detect 256 increments of positional pedalling. So you really will have an original performance brought to your living room or studio!

How do you use it?

Well the easiest way to use a Disklavier piano, is to select the music you want it to play via the controller app on your mobile device! The app allows you to control Disklavier radio, Disklavier TV and all the playback functions such as volume, record, transposition, tempo and you can even just turn off the bass or treble.

You will never run out of entertainment with 500 built in songs available in the MusicSoft library, and 9000 songs to choose from if you subscribe to Disklavier radio. Separate speakers will often play additional instrumentation and vocals to give you the full, live music experience!

As for Disklavier TV, this fantastic feature allows you to stream recorded video performances of artists directly to you own Disklavier-and yes it's as good as it's sounds! It really does mean that you get to listen to a live performance of an artist in your own living room!

The piano also has a silent system so you can play with headphones anytime! Quality of sound is not at all lost once your headphones are on, as you can still enjoy the highest quality sound sample of the CFX concert grand piano.

If you enjoy composing, you can also connect the piano to your computer or laptop and use it as a MIDI controller. You can name anything you record in the controller app!

Piano teachers and piano students who are part of the Disklavier Education Network, can also connect two Disklavier pianos together and host remote lessons and remote auditions from anywhere in the world!

One last tiny tip to round this up: Are you wondering if a Disklavier piano will fit into a certain space? If so, fear not! You can use Yamaha AR (Augmented reality) to view exactly how much space this piano will use!

Follow the link to view a Yamaha Disklavier Series!