Roland GO:PIANO Review

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Remember pianos? They were like wooden boxes, sometimes tall and straight, other times long and on legs, with metal strings inside of them. They had these white and black things on the outside called “keys” that made a different musical note whenever you pushed one. Pianos were big and expensive and impractical and yet a lot of homes used to have them, even though everybody knew the children they were bought for would never really learn how to play them. I’m sure a century ago the piano sat in a place of pride in a family’s living room, before being pushed to the side by those big, old-timey radios, and then out of the room entirely for the TV. By the end of the 20th century they were afterthoughts, just another piece of furniture to be dusted and put a few photographs on top of; if you were the kid it was bought for, a piano was also a constant reminder of your own laziness.

My family had a piano bought for a great-aunt in the 1920s or ‘30s, probably out of a Sears and Roebuck catalog and delivered to a house I never saw in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. We never kept it in tune and barely played it but there was a stack of sheet music inside its bench and my mom would occasionally try to pick out a tune. It stayed in my parents’ house until I was in my mid 30s, my family playing it on maybe five occasions all the decades I knew it. I never touched it as a kid unless I used it as a G.I. Joe base or Cobra torture device, and even when I got older and started playing music and got into home recording it was so out of tune that it was essentially its own unique instrument, something useful for writing experimental pieces but not really for playing recognizable songs or alongside traditionally tuned instruments. At some point it was shipped off to my sister’s house in Kentucky, where I assume it’s been played once in the last decade.

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The household piano is a relic, but music never dies. The point of the household piano is as valid as ever; every home should have music in it, and every person should learn how to make music, and key to that is having access to the tools that make music-making possible. With 45 years of stagnant wages and homeownership an impossible dream for many, who’s got the money or the room for a piano, though? Tech billionaires can blast their pianos into space or build an entire fleet of luxury yachts out of Steinways but for the average family a piano is as unattainable today as it is unnecessary.

That’s where the Roland GO:PIANO comes in. It’s a lightweight, portable, low-budget digital piano that tries hard to sound and feel like the real thing. And although it’s not a perfect replacement for a traditional piano, it’s closer than I expected—and with a variety of options that makes it more versatile than a real piano.

Since the keys are your main point of contact with a piano, it’s important to get them right. The GO:PIANO’s keys are velocity-sensitive, meaning it can tell how hard and fast you pound them, and play a tone that corresponds. A quick jab will make a louder, more resonant note than a light touch. If you’re used to the one-tone-fits-all keys on cheap keyboards or old organs, it can take time to get used to playing the GO:PIANO. You’ll really have to pound out those chords if you want them to ring out loudly, and try to hit every note with the same speed when you’re playing a melody. That’s what playing a real piano is like, though, and although the GO:PIANO can’t quite match the immediate tactile response of an acoustic piano’s keys, once you get the hang of playing them it’ll become second nature to you.

Roland GO:PIANO

The GO:PIANO’s piano setting is close to the real thing. You’ll still be able to tell it’s digitized, and not the sound of a real key triggering a real mallet that strikes a real wire inside a big wooden box, but it’s a far more natural and likelike piano sound than what you would’ve heard from an electric piano just a few decades ago. And with the GO:PIANO having models with both 61 and 88 keys, you can either shoot for the accuracy of a full 7 ⅓ octaves or the convenience of a smaller instrument when looking for an economical, size-friendly piano alternative.

It doesn’t have nearly the range of sound settings as a synthesizer or one of those electronic keyboards that claim to recreate 200 instruments, but the GO:PIANO does have a few options outside of the piano. There’s an electric piano setting that has the light, warm, fuzzy sound of a Fender Rhodes. There’s a pipe organ setting that makes a deep, rich hum. And there’s an orchestral mode that sounds like strings. It’s a very small selection, but the electric piano tone is as good as the main acoustic piano setting. The organ sounds the part, but the velocity-sensitivity doesn’t exactly pair well with it. The same is true with the strings, but the GO:PIANO does a far better job of emulating that type of instrument than the typical synth or digital keyboard. Yeah, it’s obvious that they aren’t real strings, but it’s still a real sound, that you hear with your real ears, and so it has its own inherent qualities and characteristics that make it a useful and versatile tool in the right hands.

Also versatile: its output options. It has an internal speaker that’s loud and strong and ideal for intimate performances, and an output jack that lets you plug into an amp or PA when you’re playing a music venue. And obviously once you’re using that output you can plug it through any number of pedals to modulate the sound, making it even more versatile.

The GO:PIANO will also help you workshop your compositions. Its onboard recorder can preserve MIDI versions of your quick sketches in progress, which can then be accessed through Roland’s Piano Partner 2 app. For more complicated projects you can easily plug your GO:PIANO into any DAW or other recording device through the output jack, or use it as a MIDI controller within other recording software. And it also comes with a membership in Roland Cloud, their subscription-based online app that includes dozens of virtual instruments and a variety of recording options.

Is the GO:PIANO the right fit for you? Well, the odds are very good that I don’t know you and don’t know what kind of music you play (or hope to play), so I can’t fully answer that. I can say that, for myself, I don’t see the GO:PIANO replacing the 1960s Ace Tone Phoenix Top-3 electric organ I use while playing in some pretty loud noise and indie rock bands. I’m sure with the right distortion setting on my amp or the right pedals I could get the GO:PIANO to match the deep, thick, immediate hum of the Ace Tone, but why force it? The GO:PIANO does make sense with a quieter, more song-focused project I’m working on, and it’s also a good fit for recording; it’s far easier to plug this thing directly into the board, or even mic an amp, than it is to figure out the best way to mic a piano. And if you’re recording in a place that doesn’t already have a piano nearby, well, the lightweight GO:PIANO soundly beats trying to roll a big hulking wooden box into a studio (and/or your friend’s basement).

No, it’s not a perfect replacement for a “real” piano. Nothing is: if you want the actual object there’s only one way to get it. But the GO:PIANO is a far more convenient instrument than a piano, and one that sounds enough like the real thing that it fits almost any need you might have short of a classical music recital. It’s cheaper, easier to maintain, infinitely more portable, and thus a smart choice for anybody who wants to learn the piano, and a perfect fit for your school, church, or, yes, living room. I’m already looking forward to the holiday singalongs I’ll force my family to endure while plinking away on this thing.

Paste‘s former senior editor Garrett Martin is now the editor-in-chief of Paste Media’s games site Endless Mode. You can also find him on Blue Sky.

The Roland GO:PIANO Review: Is It Piano Enough For Your Piano Needs?