There are times when I can see why my brother and other piano players lose interest in arrangers and electric keyboards.

Today I was playing(or rather plunking) on a Kawai grand. The piano sound was marvelous.

I've yet to hear that sound out of any electronic keyboard I've played.

Any high quality solo instrument should make you feel that way ...

And, unfortunately, you're not going to. The upside of playing a piano is the artistic expression you can milk out of the piano and the "thickness" of sound. The downside is you'll never again want to play anything other than a real piano when you want to hear "real piano."

I've been playing arrangers for some 30 years now. And I still love them. But once you start playing a quality acoustic piano the last thing you'll want to do on an arranger is use the piano patch.

I'm still going back and forth to the music stores to try out the pianos for any future piano gigs. Played them all by now.....Casio, Yamaha, Korg, Kurzweill, Roland, Nord, even the Williams. They all sound "hollow" to me now....nothing like that warm sound you hear when the hammer hits the piano strings.

The Yamaha and Kawai grands are my favorites. Play one and everything else is suddenly like playing a toy!

In the mid 70s when I worked for Avery Piano the Steinway dealer in Providence at that time they had a concert rental department. The store owned a 7 foot model B and a 9 foot model D Steinway. WHOA!!! There was nothing like the sound that came out of those pianos they could roar like crazy or sound as mellow as you wanted them to, based on how you played it.

Mark makes a great point you cant beat a piano for expression. At least for me the most satisfying gig is the one I’m doing here in Florida during the winter, it’s the weekly piano solo gig in the lobby of a medical/cancer treatment center. Granted I’m only using a Yamaha DGX-560 but it can sound very good played with the right expression. It’s not the most upbeat place to play in but I do see smiles on faces and feet tapping going on while I play.

The Roland SRX 02 expansion has been the closest experience to a real grand piano for me. It really conveys the warm, wooden sound of a mellow European grand piano, possibly sampled from a Bechstein. It‘s about the only one that has made me feel sitting in front of a real grand piano.
But it wasn‘t very popular as it only sounded good through headphones, otherwise too mellow, and it had too sudden „jumps“ in timbre between the four velocity layers.

Nice that you had a chance to play a top quaility instrument. Nothing like the touch and the sound resonating around you can compare in the digital world. But it does give a good referance point when choosing a digital. And for performing there are fewer and fewer opprotunites to play a gig on a quality piano.
The closest to a Grand I had was a 54" Kawai Studio, my first new piano. Loved it but when we moved it had to go and I was lucky to find it a good home at a local College.
My Roland FP90 gives me a close approximation so I'm happy I found it for a replacment of the real thing.