FUQ (eff -yu - cue) - FAQ's with an EDGE

Tagged As: Yamaha Portable Keyboard

Question:
I am looking for a portable full-sized keyboard with hammer weighted action and a synthesizer. I am a piano player and that's why I am stressing on hammer action keyboard. Actually I don't know anything about synthesizer or that kind of thing, so I'll just say what I really wanted for the keyboard. When I hear a good song from the radio, I love to reproduce it on a keyboard, but I don't know what kind of sound to produce. If a keyboard can synthesize or create sounds that I wanted to hear, then that's my goal. I've searched breafly and found only two keyboards that match my criteria: Alesis QS8 and Kurzweil K2500X. Both are full sized portable keyboard with weighted keys and have synthesizer. Are there anymore keyboards that would match my criteria? Another question is whether I can get a portable weighted keyboard without built-in synthesizer like Yamaha's P200 and attach a separate synthesizer to work with it. Yamaha has something like tone generators but I really don't know whether that's what I'm looking for or not. Alesis also has Synthesizer Module. Both have GM outputs so I assume they would work with any keyboard right?

Answer:
I would recommend the Roland RD-600. It is a hammer action and much more natural feeling than the Fatar action used in the Kurzweil, which from my research , has been shown to be rather troublesome as far as reliability goes. I have been playing my RD-600 for several weeks now and on a job this past weekend I had to play another keyboard player's Kurzweil Pm-88 ( I believe that is the number) I thought that the action of the Kurzweil was inferior to the RD-600 by a wide margin. The Roland RD600 is probably the best. There is also a General Music model that is highly regarded but I haven't seen it yet. Yes to all of this. Both the Alesis and Kurz you mention in the first paragraph use the Fatar keyboard which you can buy without tone generators from Fatar. All modern instruments can play synthesizer modules.