Buying a beginner's electronic keyboard

Kwest guide to buying your first keyboard

As the saying goes "a bad workman blames his tools", but you can get the best head-start as a musician by purchasing the best quality electronic keyboard you can possibly afford. I'd say you should budget on spending £200-£500 on your first keyboard. This isn't that much if your going to be forking out £33 on lessons with me each month, I'd imagine you want to hear the the best results of all that time, money and effort when your practising at home!

If your learning with me, then I really have no problem with you waiting until you have the money to buy a good quality keyboard with all the features you need, rather than buying something straight away which will quickly need upgrading. And compared to other musical instruments, good keyboards are quite inexpensive. At least they can sound like any instrument you want- the keyboard is certainly the instrument for those who enjoy variety!

Below is a jargon buster to keep handy when buying your keyboard. I've tried to explain what each feature does, why you need it, and what to look out for when choosing between keyboards.

Keys: Your keyboard should have at least 61, full-size keys. A piano has 88 keys.

Sounds/ Voices: The more sounds your keyboard has, the better, but look for high quality realistic sounds. Sounds that have been sampled are better than those that are synthesised. Sampled sounds are digital recordings of the actual instrument, whilst synthesised sounds are electronically created, and so less realistic and generally poorer quality. Also, choose a keyboard with a realistic and sympathetic piano sound, especially if you aspire to study classical piano as well.

Rhythms: The more pre-programmed rhythms your keyboard has, the more creative you can be- and the more styles of music you can play. See if the keyboard has rhythms in the styles of music you enjoy listening to and playing.

Touch Sensitivity: This is essential. Touch sensitivity basically means the harder you play a note, the loader it sounds- like when playing a piano. Without touch sensitivity, you  can’t add expression and dynamics to your playing which you need for a musical performance. We use dynamics very early on in your lessons at Kwest, and will also need to be able to play with expresson of LCM Examinations.

Floppy Disk Drive: Is very useful, so you can save your settings, arrangements and recordings for the future. The newest keyboards now have USB ports which is even better if you want to link your keyboard with a computer.

MIDI: This stands for Musical instrument digital interface and is basically an electronic musical language which electronic instruments use to communicate with each other. If your keyboard is MIDI compatible, you can link it up to other instruments and computers. If you have MIDI and a disk drive for example, you can download and use the MIDI files from the student page of this site, and many other websites. 

Recording: Look out for keyboards that allow you too record in real time, and record or ’step in’ the accompaniment section. The more tracks you can record, the better. This allows you to be more creative in making music, and compose and save your own music as well.

Polyphony: This means you can play more than one note at the same time. It is essential to have at least 16 note polyphony.

Accompaniment Section: Look for a keyboard with a good accompaniment section.

Headphone Socket: Very useful if you don't want to annoy the neighbours!