Roland FP30X Review & Buyer's Guide

Hi, I'm Tony from Bonner's Piano Center and this is my

buyer

's

guide

for the new Roland FP30x portable digital piano, so the FP30X replaces the popular FP30 model and Roland has made some significant improvements to bring it up to date and maintain it. competitive in today's market, so the first big change is that the

fp30x

now has 256 notes of polyphony, what that means is that if you are playing the piano sound or have the sustain pedal pressed and maybe you have overlapped two voices together you won't get clipped notes, that's what you'd get with a piano with a lower polyphony number, but with 256 notes you're very unlikely to experience that.

Plus, the

fp30x

has quarter-inch jack audio outputs, meaning you can connect. this to external amplification or even perhaps to an audio recording interface to record into your computer, so Roland has also increased the number of voices or tones and now has a total of 56 different instrument sounds to choose from when playing the fp30x and The last improvement, and this is a pretty significant improvement, is that the fp30x now has bluetooth audio and bluetooth midi, so the previous version only had bluetooth midi. It has both types of bluetooth connectivity and I will explain a little more about that later.

Continue in this video so the fp30x is available in black and white finishes and Roland also make an optional wooden stand and triple pedal unit so if you're considering an fp30x for your home then it's well worth it consider official manufacturer support. and pedals bonners offers a wide range of different packages for the fp30x with various stands, headphones and seats so check out our website you will find all the options and one thing I would definitely upgrade if you bought one of these is the sustain pedal that comes with it with it now I have an example here this is the sustain pedal which actually comes with just a plastic footswitch now I would always recommend you upgrade to a proper piano type metal pedal like this one I have here and The reason for this is First of all, the little plastic ones you put on the floor and I tend to get kicked very easily, whereas a more substantial pedal like this tends to stay in one place, which is nice and also gives you more the feel of a grand piano pedal rather than just a plastic footswitch, so again in our packages we offer an upgraded package that includes one of these pedals, but you can also purchase them separately on our website as well as I say check out the links in the description of this movie.

It will take you directly to the fp30x web pages on our site where you will find the latest prices and all the packages we have to offer, so let's listen to some of the sounds on the fp30x you already heard the main piano sound in the intro of this video, but now I'll play them a little more and the sound is generated using Roland's supernatural piano sound technology. Now it's a really nice sound. It's got a nice, rich bass end and a bright top as well, so I'm going to play something on the dock so you can hear the full range so you can hear it.

It's a nice rich bass end and a bright top too. but now it is a good and uniform sound throughout the keyboard, when you choose a digital piano it is not only the sound that is important, but also the feel of the keys, we call it keyboard action and it uses Roland's pha-4 keyboard, which in This case The price range is the best you will get so it compares very well to competitive products on the market and it feels very very nice to play and the way you interact with this piano sound gives you a lot of feedback that you can get. some expression in your playing quite well, so let's listen to a melody played on this now, so this is the main grand piano, the supernatural grand piano, so there are some variations in the sound of the grand piano , maybe to play different styles of music, so now I'm I'm going to select the melo grand piano and this is really good for classical pieces and in complete contrast to the soft piano.

Now I'm selecting the brilliant piano and it's perfect for playing rock and blues, so the fp30x has 56 different voices or tones and you can access them by holding down the appropriate category and pressing one of the keys in the bottom two octaves and if you look the owner's manual, it gives you a list of what sound is assigned to what key, so let's listen to some of the other sounds that are here they start with the classic electric piano sound from the '60s or '70s, so there's a big variety of different keyboard instrument sounds and what I'm going to select now is the church organ or the classical organ and I'm also going to Add the ambience effect now, what that does is give you the illusion that you're playing in a big room. church or cathedral and you will hear that it gives you a sort of reverb effect and it really sounds fantastic and is especially effective in the church. organ sounds, so listen to this, in addition to the traditional keyboard instrument sounds, there are some really nice synth sounds and I found this classic supersaw sound, as it's called, which you'll recognize was made famous in the 1980s with certain rock bands, so although you have 56 sounds to choose from, you can actually layer two, which means you can make each note play two sounds in layers, so you can get to this by simply pressing two buttons together and that I'm What I'm going to do in the next example is play the orchestral strings by themselves first and then I'm going to overlay the otherworldly piano sound and the strings together and that will give you a really nice feeling. warm sound texture, so now I'm going to press the two voice buttons together to layer the two sounds on top of each other, so another really beautiful sound combination that I found was layering the magic piano sound as Roland calls it. with the 80s fm electric piano and this gives you that classic 80s piano ballad sound that was made famous by artists like whitney houston or chicago or celine dion just listen to this, this is the kind of sound you can play for hours To do this, in addition to layering two sounds, it is possible to split the keyboard in two and have one sound to your right and a different sound to your left, so you simply activate the split by pressing the split button and then you can hold it held down and press a key, any key you want and it will split the keyboard in two, so in the next example what I have is I have a bass sound on my left and I have the piano sound on my right, this kind of te It gives a jazzy vibe, so I would like to mention the recording function of the FP30x because it is something that I have found really useful, especially for practicing musical pieces, because it allows you to record your left hand first.

Then I can play that and then you can record your right hand or practice your right hand over the top of the left hand recording, so let's take a look at that example, first of all I press record and play my left hand. part and now that I'm done recording I can play back what I've recorded and practice my right hand independently of my left hand, so I found that recording feature very useful. My piano teacher always told me when you were learning a piece of music. Practice your left hand first and then your right hand and then put both together and if only I had this 40 years ago when I was learning, it would have made the practice much easier and maybe also a little more enjoyable, so finally I just I would like to talk about the Bluetooth features of the fp30x.

It has Bluetooth audio and Bluetooth midi. What that means is, first of all, Bluetooth audio allows you to stream tunes and music from your mobile phone or tablet through the speaker. system of the fp30x, so it has a 22 watt amplification system and I must say that it is a pretty loud sound, especially considering the size of the instrument. Now what you also have is bluetooth midi and what bluetooth midi does is the type of data communication. between your instrument and your bluetooth device and in this case I'm using an ipad so Roland provides some apps that work well with the fp30x but there are also a lot of third party apps but I just wanted to talk about one of the Roland Apps which It's called piano every day and it's kind of an app that makes practicing a little more fun.

It also connects to Sheet Music Direct, which is the world's largest online sheet music library. You have to pay a subscription, but what it allows you to do is view all your scores from the app. Now I have it activated here. It also provides you with the music for the tunes that are built into the piano, so that's a use for the piano app every day. but the use I like is that it also provides some additional features for the fp30x, one of them is built-in rhythms, so you have a standard metronome built into the piano, but if you use the piano app every day, actually gives you a wide range of different drum rhythms for different styles of music and playing along with them just makes it a little more enjoyable and fun when you practice, so in this example what I'm going to do is I'm going to select a rhythm and a basic piano sound and then I'm going to bring in a synth sound halfway through and I'm going to switch to one of the rhythm variations because every rhythm on the piano every day The app actually has two variations, it also has an intro and an outro and It also has synchronized start and what that means is that the beat won't start until you hit a key, so just check out this example here, it's a pretty famous piece. of music made by Elton John and I start by playing the piano alone, then I press the sync button and then when I play a chord it brings up a rhythm, so it's just a way you can use the piano rhythms every day. but it really is a fun app and worth using if you have a fp30x, just as you can hear the sound of an instrument of this price, I mean I think it really is a great sound and there are so many features, having 56 different sounds to choose from and being able to combine two gives you so many fantastic combinations and is quite inspiring to play, so that brings me to the end of my fp30x

buyer

's

guide

.

I hope you enjoyed the little demo I've done here if you would like more information please get in touch. You will find links in the description of this movie. We offer many different packages for this particular instrument, so take a look at our website or send us a message. Give us a call if you would like us to create a bespoke package for you with particular accessories that are not included in our normal packages anyway. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in another of my piano demo videos.