Polyphony is i mportant to every digital piano player in every genre. It’s not fun if the sound keeps cutting out every so often when this could easily have been resolved by buying a better piano. The term “sounds” refers to two different things – the number of individual notes you’re playing, and the number of voices you’re using on the piano (strings, harpsichord, vibraphone, etc – whatever your digital piano offers.) You may or may not notice this, depending on what you’re playing. If you go over this limit, the piano will simply cut off some of the sounds to make room for the newer sounds. A digital piano doesn’t.ĭigital pianos nowadays generally have a polyphony of around 128 or above, although I’ve seen some as low as 64-note polyhony ( Yamaha P45) or 48-note polyphony ( the Casio CDP-130.) All this literally means is that you can have 64 or 48 different sounds playing at once. So if you were to put the sustain pedal down and play every note one-by-one, you would have 88 separate sounds.Īn acoustic piano, because the sound is dynamically generated by the instrument and isn’t recorded like on a digital piano, theoretically has unlimited polyphony.

The sustain pedal stops the notes on the piano getting cut off after you release the key, and elongates the sound. You see, on a piano, the main thing that makes this complicated is the pedal.

How to count 32nd notes piano