Best digital piano for jazz

Best digital pianos for jazz musicians. These are also great for gigging.

Here’s what most jazz players prefer:

• 88-keys piano with fully weighted keys and a nice action
• Good piano sounds, including electric pianos, and preferably Rhodes (basically more EPs, Rhodes, Wurli, Clav, Organ sounds)
• Few nice effects, such as reverb
• The instrument needs to have excellent piano, trumpet, saxophone, trombone, clarinet, and drums sounds, along with pitch bend and modulation controls.
• Preferably lightweight, without compromising on the keyboard action

This is what most jazz players desire in their piano keyboard.

While some may prefer to have more features, not many really need the bells and whistles.

For them, it’s okay if the keyboard instrument doesn’t come with many other sounds (such as organ, strings, etc), doesn’t have lots of effects, and doesn’t have the ability to layer, sample, sequence, etc.

Note: Downstream amplification and speakers play an important part in how the digital piano sounds.

Having speakers on the piano is a personal choice.

While most top-end stage pianos don’t have onboard speakers, some players prefer digital pianos with speakers.

Best digital pianos for Jazz

For jazz, You need a stage piano/keyboard with a very responsive action for playing single line solos, and for playing complex chords while comping.

• Digital pianos designed for practice: You get some good pianos from Yamaha, Roland, Kawai with nice keybed; however, they come with a limited selection of sounds and are more appropriate for practicing at home.
• For playing jazz, you need a better stage piano that is more versatile, which means in addition to an excellent keybed, it needs to have a wider selection of sounds, it should let you easily change the sounds on the fly, and should also work well as a midi controller.

The favorite among Jazz piano players happens to be the Korg SV, Roland RD-2000, and the Nord piano keyboards. These are commonly used in gigs, even for jazz.

Here are some of the digital pianos that have consistently received good comments from jazz players:

Korg SV-2 Stage Vintage Piano

Best for professionals. This is a vintage stage piano (comes in 73-key and 88-key models).

This model was introduced over a decade ago, and quickly attained wide acclaim.

Excellent vintage sounds, top-class pianos, excellent effects have inspired musicians from all over.

You get lots of presets, polyphony and control, and comes with an internal speaker system. Features Rhodes sounds.
It is comparatively lightweight, and sounds stunning through amplifiers. Read more here.

• Buy on zZounds  |  Buy on Korg.com

Roland RD-2000 Stage Piano

Great acoustic pianos and classic EPs, vintage effects like the BOSS CE-1 Chorus, and hybrid wooden hammer-action keys.

The stage piano comes with two independent sound engines, advanced controller features, and offers excellent premium action. The RD-2000 also allows you to add several sounds from Roland’s Axial website.

• Buy on zZounds  |  Buy on Amazon  |  Buy on Roland.com

Nord Stage 3: 88-key digital piano with fully weighted hammer action keybed. Great selection of organs (C2D Organ simulations B3 Tone wheel, Vintage Transistor Organs, Principal Pipe Organs) and effects.

A couple of more options for those on a budget.

Yamaha P-515 Digital Piano

This is the top piano model in Yamaha’s portable P-series pianos. Great piano sounds (including acoustic pianos) and great keyboard touch Yamaha makes some nice 88-key weighted-action pianos that feature great acoustic piano sounds and a natural-feeling keyboard.

• Buy on zZounds   |   Buy on Amazon

Casio PX-560 Stage Piano

This is a great mid-range 88-key stage piano. Its lightweight too, and also works great as a controller.

The touch screen makes it so much easy to use the various menus and functions and to make settings.

It features fully weighted keys and comes with powerful built-in speakers.

This digital piano comes with a lot of synth features as well, but if you are looking for a simplified product with less of bells and whistles, then you can consider other options (such as Yamaha’s P series piano).

• Buy on zZounds   |   Buy on Amazon

There is a good demand for used keyboards in this category as the new ones will be more expensive. So you may look around for a used piano from Nord, Roland, Korg.

You could even consider using a keyboard controller; you and play the sounds you need as VSTs on your laptop.

You may also need accessories such as stands, pedals, and an amplifier for your digital piano.

Best professional arrangers for serious jazz players.

Read: Best jazz learning resources – books, theory, sheet music