In designing their new MP7 Professional Stage Piano, Kawai has paid attention to countless details but also made a few big changes that substantially upgrade the instrument's foundation. Kawai is calling it "revolutionary."
"When you look at the specs here, you see significant improvements, enhancements, upgrades, and plain out-of-the-box thinking in every area," says Tom Love, Kawai's senior director for online marketing and electronics. The biggest changes are under the hood. " What really drives it isn't something that gets talked about a lot – the R&D team developed a new Tone Generator with a lot more horsepower. That's the central nervous system of the instrument, the core technology that everything else is driven from."
The MP7 makes a significant step up from its MP6 predecessor. Its new design and Harmonic Imaging XL sound source mean a new 256-note polyphony, a new Tone Generator with new reverb DSP, five types of amp simulation with nine parameters, four-band EQ, and a whopping jump from the MP6's 23 types of signal effects to what now number 129 effects.
An enlarged digital display (128×64 pixels) means a wide variety of functions are now available to manipulate in real time, rather than requiring a user to navigate through various edit menus.
Kawai's "Virtual Technician," which allows users to edit nuts-and-bolts parts of the piano's sound the way a technician would open up the instrument and work on individual hammers and strings, is back, now with nine parameters for piano and two each for electric piano, bass, and organ. All functions – like virtually filing down hammer felt, adjusting damper affect, tuning individual strings – are referred to by their real-world vocabulary.
"We use all piano terminology because it all goes back to our Kawai pianos," says Love, who notes that Kawai's identity as a respected acoustic piano brand is important to the MP7's development.
"You can hear differences in the details from stage pianos or digital pianos by companies that may not have the same resources," he says. "As an acoustic piano maker, Kawai has a tremendous amount of resources available to us."
Case in point is the mere work that goes into recording the sample sets – the recordings from which the instruments' sounds stem – for Kawai's MP-series instruments. While woodwind and brass sounds are recorded in Los Angeles by sought-after session musicians, months of discussion goes into simply deciding what model of Kawai piano to sample for an upcoming stage piano. Love describes a recent trip to Tokyo during such discussions. " Once we decided the model, we had one of our master piano artisans keep an eye out for a particularly great specimen. A lot of digital piano makers don't have that kind of luxury, and that kind of thought goes into all of our sample sets."
All the effort in sampling and the endless fine-tuning options is necessary, Love believes, to create an instrument with the versatility to suit any player. "There's not one perfect piano," he says. "It depends on the player and the venue and the type of music being played. It's a very personal thing."
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