
These digital pianos are even closer to the touch and feel of an acoustic piano.

Fully-weighted action keys use a counterweight to simulate the feel of an acoustic piano’s key resistance.Here’s some useful vocabulary to know about digital piano action:

Meanwhile, high-end performance keyboards can feel like you’re playing on a concert grand. Synthesizers with very simple actions can feel like pressing buttons on a game controller. That being said, how digital pianos work vary widely. This is because digital pianos have gotten very good at designing key actions that mimic those of acoustic pianos. Today, digital pianos are very sophisticated at interpreting what fingers do, and they can recreate things like dynamics and expression very well. The hammer strikes a string (or several strings, depending on the pitch of the note), creating a sound.Ī digital piano interprets the “input” of your hands to produce an output (sound) made from sampling or modeling.The key activates a series of intricate levers.Know this word well - it’ll come up a lot when you shop for a piano, acoustic or digital. What a key does when you press it is called action. It’s easier to understand the mechanisms by watching a video, but we’ll summarize the key points here. The modern acoustic piano is a sophisticated machine with over 12,000 moving parts. Know what salespeople mean when they say things like “una corda” and “semi-weighted key action.” How Acoustic Pianos Work Understanding how pianos work - both acoustics and digitals - can help you navigate the (often overwhelming) piano market.

(Photo: Docrobbie, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons) 1.2 How Pianos Work The Rhodes piano, an electronic keyboard instrument popularized in the 1970s by jazz artist Chick Corea.
