Disklavier's new "Smart" PianoSoft feature
2002-10-19 by drrltaylor
I thought the membership might be interested in reading about my experiences with the recently-released "upgrade" for the Mark III Disklaviers. This is a text copy of an email I sent to Mark Wisner at Yamaha: Hi Mark! I thought you might be interested in the first impressions of an early "end-user" of Disklavier's new "smart" feature. I just received the software update and have purchased about a ½ dozen pairs of Yamaha's new "SPS" diskettes and accompanying CDs. (1) Using the disk supplied from Yamaha, the flash update completed without a hitch. Hopefully, this update won't mess up any of the other Disklavier features, including the ability to automatically sense and play SMFs, Pianomation/QRS CDs, and PianoDisc CDs. So far so good, but I have not yet been able to test everything (2) Although the new PianoSmart manual Yamaha sent me is a little confusing (and it reads like someone in Japan translated from Japanese, rather than starting with good idiomatic English), the feature is VERY easy/simple to use (probably "idiot-proof") and works exactly as advertised (3) I haven't yet tried recording my own piano accompaniment to some other commercial CDs (my piano abilities aren't nearly good enough I'll have to wait for our son, who is talented enough, to come home from law school to try that feature) (4) I wondered how Yamaha was going to deal with the potential problem that the piano might be tuned a little sharp or flat off perfect pitch and thus not match the CD music of each pre-recorded CD. As usual, however, I see that they already thought of that. Although it's not documented in the new manual, I discovered that the Disklavier's built-in digital signal processor is smart enough to allow one actually manually to "tune" the pitch of the playing CD up or down to match the piano!! This undocumented feature really does work! QUITE IMPRESSIVE, if I must say so myself! (5) When reading about the new PianoSmart feature several months ago, I questioned whether it would really add all that much to the piano. Having sample-played most of the new special music software purchases, however, I have to say that I was wrong. We LOVE this, and this feature adds significant value to the piano and enjoyment to the music. Listening to these CDs with the (additional) live piano does really make a difference compared to playing just the CDs alone, which now sound a little "sterile". Now ..all Yamaha has to do is figure out a way to teach the Disklavier's DSP to "digitally remove" any piano from an existing pre-recorded analog music CD and convert that to midi, so the Disklavier will automatically play along with any pre-recorded music CD that might already have a piano. Now THAT would REALLY be impressive! When is that coming?!? Hope this finds you well, Mark. Thanks again for all your past help. Dr. Rick Taylor