ROLANDFP-E50 Digital Piano | Premium Piano with Expandable Sound Library | 88-Note Hammer-Action Keyboard | Professional Auto-Accompaniment | Mic Input with Vocal Harmony FX | Bluetooth/MIDI Support

As this is Roland’s first attempt at a crossover to include Piano and Synthesiser, with Roland’s Super Natural Piano sound engine as well as Roland’s famed Zen Core Synthesiser sound engine, they’ve done a grand job. The finished product is an absolute delight to use. The keyboard is Roland’s industry-admired PHA-4 keyboard, which feels the same as a grand piano. All in all, it’s apparent Roland’s engineers have put a lot of thought and effort into this instrument and their hard work has paid off. At first glance, I thought the screen would be too small and lacked information. But the more you use it, you eventually discover it’s just right. For instance, the chord E7 can be a bit tricky to get right, but when you get it, it comes up on the screen to let you know you’ve got it spot on. However, there are compromises. Because Roland have scrimped on the speaker system, they’ve given us an extra large sound box to expand the sound output. Under normal circumstances, you would never notice the smaller speaker output, because the sound box compensates. But it has increased the height of the instrument by two inches or so. Not a big deal you might think, but it depends on what you are used to. Suddenly keys aren’t where they always used to be and now have to be searched for until you get used to the extra stretch. Annoying, but not a deal-breaker. Lowering the stand might be an option for some, but for me, I cannot get my knees under it, and moves the pedal from where I want it. So that doesn’t work too well. What to do? Persevere I suppose. C'est la vie. With an extra couple of quid spent on the speaker system, Roland would have got this right first time. A Roland FP-E60 without the voluminous sound box and two inches lower, please Roland. After all, we put in just as much work to play, as your engineers do to build it. So our consideration counts. You may not think height is important, but try putting Billy Joel’s Steinway up on two inch blocks and see how far you get. He’d be chasing you down 5th Avenue.

This keyboard is wonderful. It feels like playing a real grand piano with the key action. My only 'gripe" is that the audio is loud, but not amazing quality (this is the fault of the built-in speakers, not the sound-engine). You will need external speakers/headphones to get good sound out of it.

I bought this for a summer gig, where there was no piano. As I’m a singer as well as pianist, this allows me to connect my mic straight into the keyboard and allow me to balance and my voice with the keyboard through the headphones while being connected to a PA. A great piece of kit and I can wait to start recording some tracks on!

1. The famous Roland keybed PHA-4 works flawlessly and keys feel nice.2. Tons of sounds and piano itself can be fine tuned3. Has equalizer and mic input that allows you to use internal vocoder? I need to look into that.4. Bluetooth audio and USB midi to PC. Worked along Roland support team and got it to work.5. Sound quality - amazing... almost perfect.6. Speaker sound - loud! But those speakers aren't amazing in terms of sound quality. A lot of mid tones come through however with internal equalizer and another one in plugged in external input - sounds alright.Bad stuff:1. God this thing is ugly like a nightmare.2. Navigation buttons for some reason aren't illuminated like the rest... why?3. No standard midi output - Won't connect it to Midi console which really bothers me so far...4. That outdated LCD is horrible...5. It got stuck in a menu for some reason and I need to pull the power cable out otherwise won't shut down. (Happened once)6. A big problem with the Roland Line Drivers. I've checked everything an found out that the drivers which installs itself from the piano (or windows gets it from somewhere) creates cracking sounds if you want to rerecord the piano and listen to it through the piano itself. (Otherwise you'd have a delay input on the PC). There's no way of fixing that and I'm writing to Roland for advice. If they don't have the drivers then ... well... that's a shame.Overall: This is the best you can get in that price range (as far as I checked in person)when it comes to a digital piano. The one just before that is FP-30X and is severly limited in terms of number of sounds on it. And FP30x doesn't have a screen at all. That one has at least some...The sound and build quality of that piano with that keybed is a wonderland. You can get into it without feeling that things aren't holding together.Will I keep it? I think so but... I'm not too sure just because ... It looks horrible.. I get chills by just looking at it. And no real midi out... I don't know why they did that.

Well what a fantastic stage piano very impressed for the money lots of fantastic features and you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to use it