Happy New Year – a new Baby !
Posted By Scott on January 1, 2010
I have two big Boogie Beau announcements to start 2010 off. The first one is I have a new baby with weighted fingers! Well I should say a new old baby. Yes yet another keyboard and one I’ll be practicing and playing daily on. It’s a Roland RD-700. The RD-700 came out around year 2001 and this one is in like new condition. The RD-700 was replaced with the upgraded RD-700SX around 2004, the current RD-700 model is the RD-700GX. Being near 10 years old model wise you could almost say the RD-700 is a vintage keyboard. I bought it from a pawn shop via EBAY. It came in a premium heavy duty SKB carry case which was a good thing because I could hear the UPS guy bumping it around hard getting it out of the delivery truck. This baby is heavy, the case weighs 35 pounds and the RD-700 54 pounds. My wife and I struggled to get this unit through the house.
Roland RD-700 (2001 - 2003)
So why did I want such a big keyboard? Well that comes to the second big announcement. I’m taking piano lessons at Owens College here in Toledo starting early January! It’s a one hour per week for twelve weeks of private instruction from a music faculty member. Several times over the last few months I’ve plunked around on an acoustic piano or weighted keyboard at Guitar Center for a few minutes. I’ve found it terribly hard to adjust to the hard pressing keys. The semi-weighted keys on my Juno Stage I thought would help me transition to fully weighted keys but it hasn’t. I don’t know for sure but likely I’ll be on a fully weighted keyboard in the Owen’s piano lab for the lessons. In any case I felt I needed to make the jump and verify whether my tired old fingers can chop on fully weighted keys or not. So far so good and I plan to increase my playing time on the RD-700 a bit each day.
If you are interested in the piano lessons at Owens Collegesee the Workforce and Community Services flyer for January – April 2010 Personal Enrichment Courses. The presonalized piano lesson description is listed under the Play section on page 7B. Classes aren’t back in session until Jan 11 so there still may be time to sign up as of this posting.
Comments