Joey DeFracesco's Grammy Nomination

I'm pleased to see Joey DeFrancesco's Project Freedom nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album. I might not be able to pick the Album or Song of the Year nominees out of a lineup and it makes me feel old and out of touch. But when I scroll way down the list of nominees, I see Joey, an artist a recently saw perform.

Yamaha P-255 Stand and Pedal Unit Review

For most of my first year with my Yamaha P-255 digital piano, I played it on an X stand and used the included sustain pedal. The sand was a little wobbly and the pedal, as high quality as it is, would never stay in its place. I put a box between it at the wall so it wouldn't move away from me, but it would still move side to side. So I made the leap and bought the P-255's wooden stand and pedal unit.

The stand (L-255) has a sleek and solid appearance, making the P-255 look more like a digital piano than a portable keyboard. It eliminated the wobble, of course, as I would expect no less. The actual materials are cheaper than I had expected. The feet are plastic and everything else is particle board. In fact, my stand first arrived damaged--the back board split in two--and had to be returned. However, for its intended use, the materials are probably adequate. And the connecting hardware between the stand's pieces and securing the P-255 to the stand is higher quality and fits together nicely.

I bought the stand together with the tripple pedal unit (LP-255). The pedal unit comes with a wooden baseboard that the stand looks incomplete without. The pedal unit is all plastic and felt cheap as the whole thing flexed when a pedal was depressed before I knew to loosen the screws and tighten them again when the unit rested soundly against the floor--problem solved. Still, I don't understand why the whole unit is toy-style plastic when the sustain pedal included with the P-255 is metal with a robust plastic housing, and the piano itself feels better quality that the pedal unit.

Despite its plastic composition, the pedal unit functions well. The FC4A pedal that came with the piano is really only a binary switch. The pedal unit's sustain pedal, on the other hand, allows half pedaling like on an acoustic piano, where notes sustain briefly with the dampers still making light contact with the strings. I don't remember knowing about this technique all the years I played an acoustic piano. Learning it now is a pleasure that makes the pedal unit feel worthwhile. This capability, as well as the middle sostenuto pedal and the left soft pedal, elevate to P-255 to a more precise emulation of the experience of playing an acoustic piano.

The left pedal also brings more out of the Hammond organ sounds by functioning as a slow/fast switch for the rotary speaker effect. And this is just neat because it doesn't just alternate between two discrete speeds, but accelerates and decelerates on a continuum between the two speeds, as I imagine a real rotary speaker would behave. While a digital piano with weighted keys and no drawbars will never be quite like a true organ experience, this is a nice step toward it.

There is also a pedal-activated start/stop feature that I haven't tried yet. But overall I am pleased to have full access to all the P-255's features now that I have the pedal unit and stand and I recommend these accessories to any P-255 user.