What Yamaha Keyboard is best to buy for a beginner?

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What Yamaha Keyboard is best to buy for a beginner?

by Leah
(USA)

Hi! My daughter is 4 years old and has been taking piano lessons for about a year now. She is to the point in her lessons where she really needs a quality instrument to practice on. Her music teacher said Yamaha would be a great brand for us, but I don't have the space for a large piano. I thought a keyboard would be a better fit for our family. She needs a keyboard with weighted keys and I would like it to have the same number of keys as a standard piano. I have been looking at craigslist, but have no clue if what I'm seeing are quality keyboards and if they are listed for a fair price. Given our situation, what do you think would be the best model and what would a fair price be? Also, are used keyboards reliable? I'm assuming they don't lose their tuning, since they are digital?
Here are some examples of what I am seeing on Craigslist:
YAMAHA YDP213 Digital Piano-$600
YDP-213-$475
Yamaha Portable Grand DGX-500-$500
YAMAHA DGX-505 Portable - $325
Thanks so much!
Leah

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What Yamaha Keyboard is best to buy for a beginner?

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Nov 19, 2010
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What to buy (What Yamaha Keyboard is best to buy for a beginner)
by: Dick Rector

Hello Leah,

Difficult on a distance to advice!
The CVP is a large arranger keyboard with 88 keys with key-action.
It has very good piano-sounds and can do most as, for example a PSR S910 (61 keys!) can do but is not very portable.

The CLP is a digital piano and NOT an arranger keyboard, it has no styles and no accompaniment. It has also less voices but does have all the midi voices build in to play midi-songs but they can NOT be played from the keyboard itself.
It is cheaper than the CVP.

The PSR E223 (61 keys!)is a very basic keyboard with little possibilities.
The keys are NOT touch-sensitive and you can not load external files.

PSR E413 and PSR 423 are very good starter keyboards but they are KEYBOARDS and NOT digital piano's so they have 61 keys only, that is 5 octaves. The PSR 423 is a ?basic? arranger keyboard you can load and ?tweak? external styles etc.
The best advice is to go to a good dealer and have the various models demonstrated. And play them yourself if possible!!! Beside the sound, key-action and touch is very important for the 'feel' of a piano.
On top of it, it is also and always a matter of available budget. You get what you pay for.

If you go to:
www.yamaha.co.jp/manual/english/index.php
You can download the manuals for various models and compare the possibilities.
Problem is of course if you are a novice in keyboard 'language' some of it will not make much sense to you at all.

Hope this helps a little and I hope you make a good choice.

Regards
Dick

Dec 03, 2010
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Pleased owner of Yamaha YDP-160
by: Anonymous

Hi, Leah!

I know that this response is a bit late, however, it may help someone else in their search.

I have a 2-yr-old, Arius series digital grand w/88 keys. It has weighted keys and the sound is phenomenal! The model I have is YDP-160;the Yamaha site doesn't list it but it does have the half-pedal damper effect in addition to sostenuto and soft.

Current models with similar (or more) features seem to be YDP-161, YDP-181 and YDP-V240. The V240 offers additional voices.

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