Digital Piano Function Series: The Values and Three 'T's

Greetings!

On today’s posting, I would like to discuss the “values” that governs some of the interesting and versatile utilities of our digital pianos. Such utilities include that of three ‘T’s - Transpose, Tune and Touch. Each of these are set to a numeric value which represents a certain degree of said feature; the key to which the instrument is currently transposed, or the extent that the piano responds to the strength (velocity) with which its keys are struck, respectively.

The act of Transposing in music, by its definition, is changing the key of an existing piece of music into another key, retaining the exact materials but on a different pitch level. The purpose of transposing mainly is to accommodate the range of a singer by moving its range; it also is done often in instrumental music in order to facilitate easier playing by moving the music to a key that is more natural to the instrument. Also, for inexperienced musicians who have trouble reading scores with many sharps or flats on the key signature, the music is often transposed into keys with fewer sharps or flats like C major. Digital pianos today offer transposing capabilities to any keys, allowing the players to change the key of the music without necessitating changing and re-learning of fingerings, which can sometimes be a pronounced advantage.

The tune feature is in a way similar to the transpose – in the sense that making a change to its value alters the pitch level of the instrument - but, unlike the transpose, which moves the pitch by a completely noticeable half step, the tune alters the frequencies of the notes ever so slightly – by units of cent. It is precisely the tuning that you hear players of strings and other instruments do every time prior to a performance, whereas pianos are tuned mostly by piano technicians. Of course, for obvious reason the digital piano requires few maintenance, if any, but the tune feature becomes another advantage of being a digital instrument when the instrument is used as a part of an ensemble that also includes acoustic instruments, in the sense that the acoustic instruments, tuned by hands and ears rather than machines, may not necessarily be terribly precise on matching the regular A=440 system.

The last on the list, the touch allows the players to adjust the way the piano responds to the velocity with which keys are struck. By setting the touch value to Soft, a player can produce loud sound out of the piano without having to play it forte. Vice versa, with the touch value set to Hard, the player can conjure beautiful soft lines of melodies out of the instrument with relative ease, since the notion of requiring larger force to produce louder sound allows for more delicate control of dynamic. A unique setting of “None” may be also applied, in which case the piano becomes completely insensitive to the playing strength of the fingers, resulting in equal and consistent volume of all notes that are played. More advanced models offer more detailed adjustment of Touch, dividing it into 9 degrees of different response levels.