You’re looking for a digital piano but don’t want to spend more than $500. You want it to look good with your home decor and have a sound quality and key action that’s better than its price suggests. Look no further.
Fesley FEP-1000
The Fesley FEP-1000 is a full size upright digital piano with 88 touch sensitive, weighted and graded hammer action keys just like a traditional acoustic grand piano where the keys are heavier on the lower end and get progressively lighter on the higher notes. For serious jazz & classical musicians, this piano has 3 pedals for damper, soft & sostenuto.
In addition to the default beautifully sampled stereo grand piano sound, this $500 piano comes with 380 tones including a huge variety of acoustic & electric pianos, guitars, organs, orchestral instruments, ethnic folk instruments and electronic synth voices. The 380 voices can be layered for a richer sound or you can split 2 sounds across the keyboard where your right hand plays a different sound from your left hand. A pair of powerful 25 watts speakers ensures everyone at home gets to hear your beautiful performance even if you’re living in a cavernous mansion. Should you need to play to an entire concert hall one day, you can connect to more powerful speakers using the ¼” output jack. If you’re shy about letting people around you hear you practising the same song everyday, this piano comes with two headphone jacks which you can share with a piano teacher or a friend.
To get you started, a pair of headphones is included with the piano. To help you keep in time, this piano has an onboard metronome. You also get a staggering 128 rhythms ranging from pop, rock, country, jazz and world music for you to play along. With the chord accompaniment turned on, even a beginner can sound like an entire band is playing. For the closet wannabe drummer, there’s also a drum kit for finger drumming. If you’re playing along with other musicians, the built-in transpose function lets you effortlessly play in a different key than the one you are familiar with. The 256 note polyphony also guarantees you don’t get note dropouts when playing advanced classical piano pieces. A simple to use song recorder is available for you to review and self-critique your own performance. For the times you want to just sit back, relax and listen to a professional playing to you, there are 88 onboard demo songs in this $500 piano.
The Fesley FEP-1000 is equipped with every connectivity option a beginner will ever need. A USB MIDI port lets you connect to your smartphone, tablet or laptop for use with music learning apps and music production. The music-learning app I recommend can be found here. You can stream audio backing tracks to the onboard speakers either wirelessly through Bluetooth or using a ¼” cable. The beautifully crafted wooden cabinet has an integrated sliding dust cover as well as a music rest for your song books or iPad. It comes in 2 colours - dark brown or light ash to fit your home decor.
Is the Fesley FEP-1000 perfect? No. Here’s what I like about it and what I wish it had.
Pros
For $500, this piano is ridiculous value for money. It looks expensive and the onboard speakers are loud and clear. While the sound samples will not win any Grammys and the key action is above average, they are good for the price you pay. This is no doubt one of the best choices for beginners and casual pianists that want a piano that both looks and sounds good. If you want more budget options or don’t mind paying more for better sound and key action, check out my recommended digital pianos
Cons
For a digital piano that is quite configurable, I was surprised there is no way to store my own user settings. The piano resets to factory default when you switch it off. There is also no automatic power off feature and it could be days before you realise your piano isn’t switched off. Having to scroll through 380 voices to find a sound can be frustrating. The + and - selection buttons are also reversed and are not intuitive. The buttons and labels are also too closely spaced and I often ended up activating a wrong function.
I prefer a volume knob over buttons. With 2 headphone jacks, I wish one jack is ¼” and another is ⅛” to fit all types of headphones. The wireless Bluetooth only supports audio streaming and not Bluetooth MIDI for using music learning apps wirelessly with my iPad. With just a numerical LED display, I had to constantly refer to the manual to find out which sound or rhythm was selected. While the key action is above average, for $500 the velocity curve can be better tweaked. Finally, the instruction manual just isn’t well written and can be hard to understand for a layperson. However, these are not dealbreakers if you are an absolute beginner.
You can find out the full specifications and the best price for the keyboards mentioned above together with my recommended digital pianos, keyboards, and music-learning app right here.
Comments