KeyboardZ.net

The annual musical expo at Kyiv ExpoCenter – time for every keyboardist to stretch a bit and go watch the new stuff for youself. So let's take a walk together.

Paid 5 UAH ($1) to enter the ground we make the intrusion. And the first we see is the Yamaha booth from local Jazz-club. A lot of keys here, but we are looking for new ones. And we have one, right ahead there's a portable piano NP-30 . Wow! Get my hands on it. No chance for graded keyboard, but semi-weighted feeling is allright, nice and playable. The getting around the instrument is specific though — you have to use black and white keys to operate the patches and change the metronome speed. Takes a time to adjust to...

The instrument weighs literally nothing - you can get a "bunch in one hand feeling" by trying to lift it up. OK for "over-the -shoulder" piano. Ah, but surely it misses two wheels (pitch bend and modulation of course) to make it a decent portable 76-key MIDI controller.

Moving further – there's Yamaha MM6, one more newsmaker this year. The patches sound fresh, Yamaha-like. The keyboard gives a light feeling, but it has a large informative LCD, that's good.

After a few minutes at Yamaha P-140 I give up. Not my type of action, and Enver Izmaylov playing his magic guitar right here makes me loook aside.