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.
