Greets to everyone. Just thought I'd pop this onto to here as I am keeping all the good stuff here and the gripes elsewhere. It began as part of a gripe and I thought "this deserves mention on the good blog" as I have to spend time appreciating good things like this.
I decided to support a local social program seeing as I spouted off about supporting community business and social programs by going out and spending every once in while. If times are tight then budget comes first. If you are confined to your house via mobility problems, then order in every once in while. Its good for you and importantly its good for the community. I decided to put my money where my mouth is and went to the local community drop in center. Much to my surprise, they two pianos which was awesome as I haven't played a real piano in years (as much as I love my keyboard which I can make sound like just about any instrument, but its nice to hear it played by a real player with the real instrument when one is available) and I honestly love the feel and action of a piano keyboard, and that was awesome and I thanked the staff for the opportunity.
I played music for about an hour and a half, a mixture or jazz covers, some blues improv and some rock covers and then went to use the computer after feeling pretty good. Very nice pianos. One was an apartment sized upright, with a light to the touch action, making it great for dextrous playing and other high speed maneuvers. Nice for the ballads as well, with very nice action and little resistance. The second one, an older and much more worn full sized upright had the full action and character reminiscent of its appearance. It looked like someone could have taken it from a barrelhouse in the 1920s.
Both were in tune, though I the elder had the right amount of detuning to make it ideal for honky tonk and blues piano, and had the character to back it up, with chipped keys and the occasional lower register keys out of tune just enough to remind me that it had been around the block a few times before I had probably learned how to walk. The apartment sized piano had a nice crystal clear sound with good resonance considering the size of its acoustic chamber compared to other. I could tell that I probably could have put it out of tune in about a couple hours of playing if I wasn't light handed enough on the action.
Definitely a great piano for those who are used to the world of synths and midi controllers, as the action is reminiscent of the weighted action of a weighted midi controller. I've been into this stuff for a long time, and I'm not speaking through someone else or "stealing" the credit of knowing about these things from someone else. I've been a midi user since before the General Midi spec existed and before Stevie Wonder did his first promotions for EMU's parallel interface, a competitor with the MIDI spec that lost out because of the limited cable length allowance for the EMU parallel cables (around 15-25') versus 100' for MIDI's serial version. EMU still made some great samplers though. I used to love pushing out prophet 5 patches onto a tape deck (which stored the patch information so you could reload it before a gig or in the studio) when I was 12 years old. (No Pinnochio there either).
There's a kitchen as well and they serve coffee and a great lunch and snacks.
The pianos won my support right away! Support the programs there by dropping in:
650 Queen St. E.
Toronto, Ontario
West of Broadview Ave and East of the Don Valley Parkway.
For all you pianoless piano players out there, and if you want guitar lessons, apparently they have a great guitar class there. So drop in and talk to the great staff there.
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