Digital Piano Function Series: The Layer

Hi everyone!

After writing a few numbers of posts about our featured digital piano, I’ve noticed that whenever I addressed the versatile utilities of our products, the words are then summarized into “the traditional digital piano utilities”, without providing any explanations of what they exactly are and what they actually do. From now on, I intend to regularly post a series of introductions on the conventional digital piano utilities that are found on our products, more or less depending on the model – this includes layer, split, reverb & effect (chorus), transpose, tune, twin piano to name a few. In other words, what digital pianos are capable of these days.


The Layer - You no more need two players to play two instruments.

The first on our list, the layer, is basically just that - playing two instruments at once. Using the layer mode incorporates an additional voice of instrument (“layered voice”) to be played along with the “main voice” simultaneously, allowing its player to sound two instruments by playing one piano keyboard. A combination commonly used in churches and other casual settings is that of piano and strings - the ensemble of piano and strings has been consistently exploited throughout the history of music, hence the appeal of this particular choice of layer – but other types of instrumental combinations can be also effective, and such exploration greatly expands the palette of tone colors.

On Dynatone’s digital piano models, the volumes of the main voice and the layered voice can be set individually, independent from each other. While some of the entry-level products offer limited palette of few voices designated specifically as layer-only voice, our more advanced models allow the players to choose any of the voices incorporated in the piano either as a main voice or a layered voice.

I hope this post and the consequent ones to follow would provide the general picture of what digital pianos today are actually capable of doing!