My traveling practice keyboard setup!

My last travel keyboard is Piano de Voyage from France in 4 pieces screwed together. It's packed into a suitcase in 4 pieces. The keys are playable but only semi-weighted. The piano sound isn't great but toleratble.

The price was around $1500. At 7 lbs it's a light keyboard with a solid metal body. The rest is quite basic. Got very few buttons & knobs and none of them labelled.

HeartKeys I’m using the following:

M-Audio Keystation 88. Terrible action but weights only 13 pounds, and powered by USB. And hey it’s 88 keys.
NewQ USB hub to connect my earphones and keyboard into the iPad.
iPad loaded with Pianoteq.
Shure SE846 earphones.

My traveling practice keyboard setup is based on the same principles, but I have a Swissonic keyboard, Pianoteq on my MacBook, and Soundblaster Play! 3 between the keyboard and the Mac. Not 88 though, but, that is okay.

I find the whole "88 key" thing interesting. Bosendorfer did extend that lower octave on down to the C below, which is kinda cool. Mostly, I see that covered up so that you can't play those notes. But I wonder how long it would take a good jazz player to be down there messin' around. I also tend to run out of keys on the top end with some runs, just 'cause.

Most interesting thing is, it would be VERY easy to extend either end on a keyboard, not so easy on an acoustic piano.

Totally worthless thought, but I thunk it, so... LOL!!

Bellyman
88 keys is a post-19th century standard piano manufacturer adopted. The time of Mozart, Haydn & early years of Beethoven people composed music for a piano with fewer keys.

Very low & high sound pitches are for special effects. Our ears don’t pick up sound pitches very well pass a certain point.

Portable keyboards for travelling can have 88 keys. Some fold into pieces or connect together in pieces. Others have fewer than 88 or narrower keys.

Interesting discussion. I was in Vienna recently. While I was there. I visited the museum of music that exhibits pianos of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and others. Here are some photos I took. It looks that Beethoven’s piano does have more keys than Mozart’s.

Like @thepianoplayer416, I have a Piano de Voyage. Besides the semi-weighted and spring-loaded nature of the keys that feels pretty weird when playing fast or light passages, the short key levers also mean that when you play up between the black keys, it takes noticeably more force to press the key down.

The pieces of the keyboard are actually just slightly large enough to be inconvenient to pack into a carry-on, so I still need to figure out the best way to carry all 4 pieces. A couple weeks ago, I brought along 3 of the sections totaling 63 keys on a short trip. That was mostly sufficient to practice notes for the Haydn Sonata I've been learning (minus a couple low Gs) but couldn't really do any more delicate work due to the nature of the action. And it definitely wasn't enough range to practice most of my rep.

candela To be fair, my science isn't very elaborated. 73-key Yamaha P-121 is ranging from E to E. I don't know if E to E is superior over C to C. It depends on what notes are written in the music you play.

WieWaldi I think 88 keys is maybe too much for a traveling keyboard.

Maybe. But I really think a person has to ask the honest question; "Do you play the notes that would be missing on a 61 or 73 or 76 note keyboard?" If you never play them, the answer is obvious. If you do play those notes quite a lot, a shorter keyboard may not be ideal.

There are a lot of players out there who really may not play all 88, ever. I ain't one of 'em. I'd play 108 if they were available. There have been a whole lotta times I've gotten carried away with a run, in either direction, up or down, where a finger hit the wooden cheek block of the piano where a certain key would be if it existed.

Used to torque me off when I was tuning pianos. One of the "45 minute wonder" tuners would completely skip the top octave to octave and a half on a tuning and remark, "nobody ever plays those notes anyway". Um, yeah, some of us do. He had his list of faithful customers. There was another list of customers that said, "never send him to tune my piano again".

I am using the Roland Go-Piano for airline travel. It weights around 8 lbs and can run on batteries. It has 61 keys. What I like about it is that it has a width of only 34.6 inch (87.8 cm), thus it fits perfectly into a duffle bag within airline luggage dimensions. And there are no buttons to break off.

Not sure if it has been mentioned already, but some of those keyboards including the Roland Go-Piano can shift octaves. I have used that feature occasionally and it works as long as the overall range of the song fits within those 61 keys. It took me a while to adjust to the shifted middle C, but it works alright.

Cheers,

MandM Both your Go-Piano and my Casio CT-S1 were on my shopping list on top-left position. I almost geared to the Roland because it has 4 cm less of width. Then I realized that all the cheap available transport bags are eating up that advantage.

I totally understand what you like about it. The octave shift is of course a no-brainer feature for 61 keyboard. I use it quite often on mine. I just realized, Casio released my keyboard as 76 key version, too. Would I change if I could? Probably not, for practicing purposes 61 is still good enough, and I like the size. The 76-key version with 115 cm width would not fit that easily into the trunk of my car. I would need to transport it diagonal, eating too much space when I go for holidays with a lot of other luggage.

cheeeeee Thank you very much for posting this pictures.
Mozart's has 68 keys, ranging from F to C and
Beethoven's has 72 keys, ranging from F to E. (Can't see if the top note is E or F)

It is also interesting, that Mozart's has the modern white/black key scheme, while the picture above shows the colors inverted. (In the Mozart movie, he also played the black keyboard.) I did a short search on the internet, when this color scheme has changed but found nothing about it. Looks like in early Mozart days there was the black scheme, but in his later days it swapped. As Mozart didn't get that old, I can now narrow this down to about 1775 to 1790.

WieWaldi

Nice detective work . The music museum in Prague which I visited later also houses many historical pianos, including one that was used in the Mozart movie.

WieWaldi It is also interesting, that Mozart's has the modern white/black key scheme, while the picture above shows the colors inverted.

The instrument in the painting looks like a harpsichord to me. Even today a reversed color scheme seems very common for harpsichords, from my personal unscientific experience.

candela Or maybe it is a piano. The middle one shown in this video looks similar.

WieWaldi think 88 keys is maybe too much for a traveling keyboard. I have a 61 key Casio that weights about 5 to 6 kg including bag and all accessories

May I ask how you like about the action of this Casio keyboard? I’m considering the Casio S160 for traveling purposes but the Casio CT-S1 seems a more practical choice. Is the action as good as the regular models with 88 keys? Thanks.