Supported Casio Digital Piano models: AP-470, AP-270, PX-870, PX-770, CDP-S100, CDP-S350, PX-S1000, PX-S3000. Some features, such as the available functions, screen displays and names, differ depending on the model. Check the App Store or Google Play for information on supported OS and models. PIANO/ORGAN Button 180 rhythms and Auto Accompaniments for Latin music and other styles from around the world (180 rhythms including 87 ethnic rhythms and 20 patterns for piano play) An advanced Auto Accompaniment feature provides you with access to a large collection of ethnic rhythms from around the world, with a special emphasis on Latin.

Casio Electric Piano Keyboard
Casio Piano Chords
Casio Piano Chords

Casio has a unique pop-culture legacy among makers of electronic keyboards. In the 1980s, the brand became so synonymous with fun, inexpensive, portable keyboards that Casio is still often used as a generic term for the entire product category, as Kleenex is for tissues or Xerox for photocopiers. Yet Casio has often aimed to transcend this image’s association with toy-like products, an image that has otherwise served them well. The company’s best-selling and longest-lived such effort, dating back to 2003, has been the Privia line of portable digital pianos, which offers professional-grade sound quality and keyboard actions while sacrificing neither affordability nor ease of use.

The Privia PX-S3000 establishes a new benchmark in this effort. Here’s the Twitter version of this review: Almost everything about the PX-S3000—keyboard feel, realism and nuance of acoustic piano sounds, variety of great non-piano sounds, build quality, auto-accompaniment features, and more—makes me feel as if I’m playing an instrument that should sell for $1,500 or more. But the PX-S3000 costs only $799, with retailers such as Sweetwater bundling it with matching console stand ($130), soft case ($130), and triple-pedal unit ($100) for a discounted total of around $1,125.

You also get a surprising amount of audio effects power, the ability to stream audio through the Privia’s speakers over Bluetooth (to play along with songs stored on your mobile device), a useful MIDI song recorder, audio recording directly to a connected USB thumb drive, and wired USB connectivity to Casio’s Chordana Play for Piano educational app for Apple iOS and Android devices (see sidebar, “Chordana Play for Piano”).

Build and User Interface

The Privia PX-S3000 is the most compact instrument with 88 weighted keys I’ve ever beheld, bar none. It weighs under 25 pounds and can run on six AA batteries, though an AC power supply is included. At first sight, the instrument gives the impression of having been carved from a solid block. It’s made of plastic—there’s no other way to build an 88-key instrument that weighs so little—but the plastic is thick, the few seams are tight, and the overall fit and finish are excellent.

The PX-S3000’s design is a study in minimalism. Physical controls with moving parts are limited to the power button and master volume dial at top center, and a pitch-bend wheel and two assignable knobs along the top left cheek—a boon for use in live bands. All else is achieved with touch-sensitive “buttons” that are actually backlit icons shining up at you from just under the completely smooth surface of the top panel. The icons change based on which mode you’ve selected for a given area of the panel; and if you don’t touch the instrument for a few minutes, it goes into a “screen-saver” mode in which the buttons cycle off, then reappear if you press a key or anything else. When the PX-S3000 is powered off, the controls vanish.

All those touch-sensitive backlit buttons are in high-contrast white on black—I had no difficulty reading them under changing stage lighting or in direct sunlight at a backyard-barbecue jam. If there’s a downside, it’s that, as with a touchscreen, you have to look at what you’re doing. With physical buttons, you can learn to navigate an instrument by feel. Moving parts, though, are some of the costlier components on any keyboard’s bill of materials, so the Star Trek touch panel is surely a factor in the PX-S3000’s low price. Not that it conveys cheapness—on the contrary, its retro-future look is classy; as if, back in 1990, Casio took notes from home-hi-fi-as-sculpture mavens Bang & Olufsen.

Keyboard

Even without taking into account the PX-S3000’s diminutive size and weight, its key action would be considered excellent—but when you factor them in, it’s extraordinary. The texturing on the key surfaces, to provide grip and an authentically piano-like feel, feels a bit coarser and more pronounced than I’m accustomed to, and I’ve come to prefer it.

The action more than qualifies as fully weighted, but gives a first impression of being on the light side if you try playing with the power off. The PX-S3000 has five touch-response settings—two light, one normal, and two heavy—plus a fixed-velocity (non-touch-sensitive) option. As in all electronic keyboards, the PX-S3000’s touch settings alter the touch response, not the actual key weight, thus requiring a faster striking of the key to achieve a given loudness and brightness of tone. Nonetheless, I found that they ingeniously tricked my brain into perceiving the action as physically harder to play. With the heaviest setting, anyone looking to develop virtuosic finger strength can get a genuine workout. The Normal and Light settings are good options for playing fast passages in non-piano Tones (aka Voices) such as organs, strings, or synths. Best of all, a touch response is stored as part of a Registration (a memory preset in which can be saved combinations of virtually every sort of setting the PX-S3000 offers), so you can optimize it for different combinations of Tones.

Speaking of Tone combinations, the PX-S3000 permits basic splits and layers. You can: layer two Tones (e.g., piano and strings) across the keyboard’s entire range; split the keyboard so that the left and right hands can respectively play, say, double bass and piano; or do both, with one Tone in the left-hand part and a layer of two Tones in the right. The split point can be changed by holding down the Split button (revealed by using the Function button to toggle the rightmost bank of buttons into “Ctrl” mode) and striking a key.

Selecting Tones and turning on splits/layers is achieved using different “pages” of the same button row—again, you step through these pages with the Function button, so there’s some going back and forth. With layering active, the instrument will consider the current Tone to be the first Tone in the layer—that is, the Upper1 part—and the panel will select only the layer’s second Tone, called the Upper2 part. With splitting active, you can select the Tone for only the Lower part. The display will show a U2 or L icon to remind you of this, but to change the Upper1 part, you have to step back down into Ctrl mode, turn off the split or layer, then step back into Tone selection mode. You can save the whole thing as a Registration (up to 96 of them), which will also save any rhythm or accompaniment setups you may have selected. If you create a lot of splits and layers, the procedure can feel a bit clunky. That said, having the same few buttons perform multiple tasks is a necessary concession to a slender profile and low cost. Splits and layers are much quicker, however, when you’re controlling the PX-S3000 from the Chordana Play for Piano app; I describe the procedure in the sidebar at the end of this review.

Casio refers to the PX-S3000’s action as “Smart Scaled.” This means that while the keys are physically graded—with heavier weights toward the bass and lighter weights toward the treble—the PX-S3000 takes things a step further. Digital blackjack strategy. Internal algorithms use a combination of number-crunching and the physical key-weight differences to emulate the individual behavior of each of the source piano’s 88 keys. It works quite well.

Acoustic Piano Sound

The main piano sound in the Privia PX-S3000 is an acoustic-piano sample re-engineered from recordings originally made for Casio’s Celviano Grand Hybrid (models GP-300 to 500), the company’s proof that they can build a high-end home digital piano at a price that lets you afford a home to put it in. Specifically, it’s the variant called “Hamburg Grand,” and while Casio doesn’t say so, in the industry we know this to be code

Casio Piano Chord