Good fun for keyboard beginners (Casio LK-93 TV)

Member Name: Russ1973

Product:	Casio LK-93 TV
Date:	04/06/09 (168 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Gets you having fun and playing real songs quickly

Disadvantages: Doesn't truely teach you to play keyboard or read music

My partner owns this keyboard and I have had great fun playing with it.

It is a pretty solid keyboard, the keys all feel nice, smooth and free-moving and it feels nice to play. It has touch responsiveness, whereby if you hit a note harder it will play it louder. It also has the usual bank of sounds (264), rhythms (120), etc.

What stands this keyboard out from the crowd is Casio's teaching system.

It lights up it's keys to tell you which note to play next when playing songs from it's in built memory or optional SmartMedia card. There are 3 stages to training (and testing) and you can train left hand, right hand or both at the same time.

It has 35 built in piano pieces and 64 other songs along with storage for 5 of your own songs. You can also use a SmartMedia card for extra storage.

In theory, you can download midi music files and convert them (using the casio converting software) so that the keyboard can teach you how to play them.

In practice this is not as straight forward as it sounds as the part of the midi file that you want to learn to play may not necessarily be on the right track in the midi file. The keyboard uses track 3 of the midi file for the left hand and track 4 for the right.

You can edit midi files and change the tracks so that they are in the right place for the keyboard using a resequencer program, but I have mixed results. A few midi's turned out ok, but many more did not. I think it has more to do with the poor quality of the midi's that I found than it has to do with the keyboard.

Another feature this keyboard has is to put karaoke lyrics on your tv screen while it/you play the songs. Again though, this is only for it's built in song bank and other songs on SmartMedia that you buy from Casio.

It's a fun keyboard to play around with and it can teach you some songs, however, it won't teach you to read music or play properly. But it's a good start for a beginner to get used to the hand movements, etc that are required for playing the keyboard.

Oh, and I've recently discovered I can plug my guitar into the mic input and use it as an amp as well while my partner plays the keyboard. Whether this is advisable, I don't know, but it seems to work well for us.

Summary: Good fun, value for money, nice to play, but the teaching part is just a bit of a novelty