Hi it's Rudi from Better Music, welcome to our youtube channel! What can I say, I've
just played this amazing new Roland LX-17, it's absolutely stunning. It feels like I'm
playing a concert grand, it's really quite amazing to play, I mean this is the LX-17,
it's the range topping model. Below that there's a model called the Lx-7, then the HP-605 and
below that there's a model called the HP-603. They all share the same amazing sound, they
all immerse you in this pianistic experience, they've all got over 300 sounds on board,
they all give you just this sense that you're playing something thats come about that's
different from everything that's been on the market before. So the most important thing
with the whole range is that Roland developed and entirely new way of producing the sound.
Most digital pianos use what's called sampling technology, where they sample the sound, Roland
have come up with technology which is called SuperNatural Modelling. So everything you
hear in this piano is not coming from a recording of a piano, it's being created by the instrument,
and that's across the range, all four models. The main thing I'll explain more in another
video about it in detail, but the main thing about it is that it basically, like I said
before, immerses you in the piano experience, the piano comes to life, it brings emotion
to your playing. It doesn't just play back a recording of each note as it would be played
back the same time every time, it creates harmonics, it creates things as they would
happen in a real grand piano or concert grand piano. So the thing comes alive, that's probably
the most accurate way to describe it, that they come alive when you play them. But what
I might do is run through a few of the sounds on the instrument, again, all of the range,
all four models have over 300 sounds, four of the piano sounds are actually using the
SuperNatural modelling technology. So in the intro I was playing the concert grand sound,
so I'll go through and show you some of the other voices, so this is the model called
the ballad piano, so it's a little bit smoother, it's a little bit warmer, it lends itself
to lots of music, so I'll show you what that one sounds like.
Just listen to it, the sound will decay like a real grand piano, it doesn't cut out, it
doesn't start going around in circles, it's just a real piano, it's pretty incredible.
So that's the ballad piano, the next one is called the mellow piano, so it's even a little
bit darker, a little bit warmer, again a completely different character.
Just listen to it, it's still going, it's pretty amazing. Okay so that's some soft,
some big, what if you want to play a little bit of jazz or a bit of blues, well there's
a really nice sparkly bright piano in here, which lends itself to playing some groovy stuff.
So there's your bright piano, very very sparkly, yeah it's a lot of fun, as I said there's
over 300 sounds on the whole range, I'll do another video where I'll show a few of the
other sounds as well. The action's really really important as well, Roland have produced
a mechanism which gives you the best of both worlds. You've got a hybrid composite action,
so you've actually got real wooden keys, and that plays a really critical role in the actual
determining of the feel of the instrument. You've got a fully graded and fully weighted
mechanism, so it's actually heavier at the bottom that at the top, again I'll do another
video on the action, but suffice it to say, it allows you to play the instrument in a
way that you can utilise the full extent of it's sound capabilities, it's very very responsive.
What you can't really appreciate because you're not sitting in front of the instrument, you're
listening to it on the internet, is that this instrument, the range topping model, as I
sit at it, the sound is projected to me through a multitude of speakers that actually makes
it feel like I'm sitting at a concert grand, the technology roland have used for this is
called acoustic projection. So on this model you've got two big 25cm speakers in the bottom
of the cabinet, and you have a 6 channel speaker system with separate amplifiers, with tweeters
that are asymmetrically mounted and all those speakers aren't just playing the piano sound,
it's not just like a whole bunch of speakers, each speaker is doing different things and
getting a different signal from the actual computer brain of the piano, so you might
get some sympathetic resonance or some cabinet noise or some hammer noise or ambient noise,
all the things that you would naturally hear in a real piano when you're playing them are
reproduced by these speakers, so when you sit at the piano, for the first time I've
tried this piano with headphones, and it sounds incredible on headphones, but for the first
time ever, i can enjoy playing it on it's speaker system more than headphones, and there's
not many pianos you can do that on, because generally the speakers on these pianos are
the weakest link, but not in this case with this new series from Roland, they're pretty
stunning. So what else have we got? We've got some great technology, Roland, a world
first in digital piano technology now, have introduced bluetooth technology across models
in the new HP and LX range, so what does that do, well instead of using, you know, wireless
or connecting cables and all the rest, they've implemented the technology and we can basically
connect an iPad an android device, an iOS device, we can stream audio from our phone
from a youtube video we can use a huge amount of apps, I mean i've got one of them here,
this ones call Peer Score, and basically it allows you to download up to 70,000 different
scores of all sorts of different music, you can download the score, the score comes up,
you can actually bluetooth with the pedal of the piano, you can bluetooth and turn the
pages of the music, you can also while you've got the piece of music there, the app will
actually search for a youtube video of performance of the piece so you can listen to it and watch
it and see how you know a bunch of other people might play the tune. And on top of that you
can write on the score, you can put notes and you can save all this information, and
this is just one of the apps, we could sit here for hours looking at all the apps that
are available, but there's just so much, this bluetooth technology, again it's not unique
to just apple or android, any bluetooth device can stream audio and MIDI with some apps as
well to the piano, so this is pretty groundbreaking stuff, and Roland as always are sort of leading
the way with this stuff, they're not scared to spend the money on developing the technology,
I think it's just fantastic, really really good. I hope you've enjoyed watching the video
on this new Roland LX-17, as I said before it's just beautiful to play, we'll be doing
a lot more videos in the future so if you're enjoying them please subscribe to our channel,
for the moment I'm going to have a bit more of a play. See ya later.