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Episode: 2784
Title: HPR2784: The Yamaha Disklavier
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2784/hpr2784.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 16:48:58
---
This is HPR episode 2007-184 entitled The Yamaha Disk Lavier.
It is hosted by John Kulp and is about 24 minutes long and carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, I talk about the Yamaha Disk Lavier DKC 500 R.U.
that's in my office at work.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org
forward slash donate.
Hey everybody, this is John Kulp and Lafayette, Louisiana.
And I'm recording another episode for Hacker Public Radio.
Today I'm going to talk about one of the coolest things I've ever seen.
It is a Yamaha Disk Lavier.
The Disk Lavier is a kind of piano, a little background.
When I became director of the School of Music and Performing Arts here at the University
of Louisiana at Lafayette, I got to change offices.
I went from being in a rather small office next to the trumpet professor, which was extremely
noisy, into the largest office in the department, the only one that's got windows, incidentally
always keep the blinds closed because else I can't see my computer very well.
But one of the things that came with this office was this magnificent piano.
It's a Yamaha, which I mean Yamaha make excellent pianos just without any fancy frills
added to them.
If you just get a straight up Yamaha acoustic piano, it's wonderful.
But this one is a Disk Lavier.
The Disk Lavier is a player piano that was invented in the late 1980s, I believe.
This one, according to the webpage I found that helps you date your Disk Lavier, this
one comes from around 1990, which I think jives with what I've heard about how we acquired
these things.
We've got five of them in the department in various parts of the building.
I'm told that we got them on a grant proposal.
This was before my time.
I was still in college at the time.
But since they're so expensive and since our department doesn't, by default, have money
to buy things, we got a grant to buy them.
I think the idea at the time was for people who needed piano parts to go with something
else, like singers who have to sing for their juries or their recitals.
They always have to hire a pianist to play with them.
I think the idea behind the grant was to get these things where the pianist could record
with the singer, and then the singer could just practice using the recorded sound on one
of these Disk Laviers, and not always have to have the human pianist with him or her.
I don't know that it was ever really used extensively in that capacity, but I've got one
in my office here, and every once in a while, I will put in a disk and play something on
it, and it's just really, really wonderful.
Now, this is one of the older ones, so the disks are actually floppy disks.
Now, I should say the word disk clavier is a clever combination of two words, disk and
clavier.
Disk, of course, just means disk, like a floppy disk.
Clavier is the German word for keyboard, and so it's a very nice clever combination of
the two words there.
I'm going to put a couple of pictures of the control unit in a flicker slide show or
something, so that you can see what it is that I'm talking about here.
It's a small thing, about the size of modern DVD player.
It's got a little LCD readout, and several buttons to control, stopping, playing, pausing,
recording, skipping to tracks.
You can choose left or right channels, and you can also control the volume to some extent.
Now there's a speaker that's with this that I, it's not hooked up, and I'm not sure exactly
how you hook it up or what it's really for.
I would have to read up on that a little bit.
I've never heard it actually in use.
It's a Yamaha speaker, so clearly it's meant to be paired with the piano and the control
unit, but I don't know.
It's got a microphone input, so maybe, maybe you're supposed to plug in a microphone
like if you wanted to sing along with the piano, pop songs or something like that, you
could play a track on the piano and then sing through this little speaker with a microphone.
I don't know, I've never tried it, but maybe I should.
My daughter would be keen to do that experiment with me, I'm sure.
So the way this thing works, it's say, I don't know all the technical details, and in fact,
maybe I should have had our piano technician to interview to get more details on this.
But the piano on the inside, I'm from the outside, it looks just like any other piano,
it's a beautiful, shiny, glossy black piano, it's upright, this is not a grand piano.
They do make grand piano disc live ears also, but this is one of the upright ones.
And if you look inside the lid, you can see that there are little wires going down and
attached to every single key on the whole piano.
And these, presumably, are what are, you know, the signals are sent from the controller,
and it plays keys and presses pedals and so forth.
What this thing does is it can record precisely any performance that you play on it.
So you sit down and you press record, and it will record every single thing that you
do on the keyboard, all of the exact dynamics, every note, the exact rhythms, and the exact
pedaling that you do, and store it in a MIDI file on a floppy disk.
Now these are really floppy disks because it's just from what, 1990.
The modern ones, presumably, would have USB drives or even internal storage, and the modern
ones are also networked.
So your disc live ear can be connected to the internet for various reasons, one of which
is there's a thing called disc live ear radio where they hire pianists to come into a studio
in some central location and just play the piano live.
And they would have classical pianists, jazz pianists, pop, you know, tune into whichever
channel you want to hear, and you can stream an actual live performance of a piano, who
knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles away, and it actually plays your piano in your
living room or wherever you have the piano, it's crazy cool technology.
One of the cool things about playing this also is that you can watch the keys going up
and down as the thing plays.
Now the player piano is not a new concept, it goes way back to maybe even the 19th century,
I would have to Google this, but I'm pretty sure they had player pianists in the 19th century
that were controlled by piano rolls, that were like rolls of paper with holes punched in
them or something like that.
And some of the very famous pianists in history have made piano roll recordings, rock
monon off in Ricca Garnados and others of that sort.
And so you can hear them playing, if you've got a piano that will play back those rolls,
you can get actual performances by those people right in your room on a real instrument.
I think the first time I ever saw a discolver was, I was working at the Library of Congress
in Washington, D.C. one summer, 1993, and on my way home every day I had to walk from
the library over to a specific spot where the van was going to pick me up and I would,
if I had a few free minutes I would walk through Union Station, and they had a Yamaha
discolver grand piano set up in there that was always just playing.
And I used to stand there and watch it, I remember sometimes it would be playing like
Vladimir Horowitz, one of the great pianists of the 20th century, Vladimir Horowitz will
be sitting there playing for you as if he's a ghost.
And it's a really, really cool technology.
Now I've also used this.
There was a time when I wrote some music for piano forehands that I was going to play.
Now I am not a pianist, and so I wrote these pieces, three easy pieces for piano forehands
with the intention of writing them for people who were pretty good musicians but who were
pretty terrible on the keyboard.
And so getting ready for the performance, piano forehands means that there are two people
sitting at the same keyboard.
To get ready for the performance, I used to practice with one of these discolifiers.
So I would play my own part live and I would have the other person's part as a midi file
playing with me so I could practice with it over and over and over again without having
to bother the person I was going to be performing with.
And it was extremely helpful.
And let me tell you, it is absolutely unforgiving when it comes to tempo.
You cannot slow down for one second because it just keeps on going.
It's literally a machine.
Alright, so maybe I've talked enough about it.
Let's listen to something.
What I'm going to have to do is I've got two different recorders going here.
So I'm speaking into my Zoom with a Sony stereo microphone attached to my lapel.
And I've got my mother-in-law's Moran's professional recorder over here with a different
microphone setup.
And so I'm going to start the recording on that now.
And this is because the piano is so loud that it's going to be really distorted in my
speaking microphone if I tried just to use that microphone to get the sound.
And so I think this is going to work.
I'm going to have two recordings and I'm going to sync them up by doing a clap here.
Let's see.
Okay, that should allow me to sync up the tracks so that any speaking I might do over it
will line up just right.
But I think what I'm going to have to do is whenever the piano is playing, I'm just going
to mute my spoken audio file, we will see.
So I've loaded up a couple of things here.
The first one that I want to play for you is one of my very favorites.
This is from a website, there's a website where you can download tons and tons of files
to be played back on your disc live here.
And I will have a link for that in the show notes.
This is one of my very favorites.
It only says untitled on the little display here, but it's, hang on, let me find the title
of the song.
It's something about something love, love, love or something, you know, most of those
pop songs are, I have a listing of all the tracks here, oh that's not the right one, shoot.
It's from a, wait, falling in love with love, that's it, falling in love with love, Richard
Rogers and Lauren's heart.
So it's a Rogers and heart song.
And it's played here by a jazz pianist.
Now, the website says that these are all public domain and they might just be referring
to the, the disc live your files and not the actual song that is being played.
So I won't play that much of it because I don't want to alarm kin unnecessarily.
Here we go.
This is falling in love with love, played by some guy and recorded on disc live here and
now I'm playing it back on this one.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here.
Here.
Here now.
Hear that?
Okay, just go ahead I do it between two sides and this side.
Here now.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Okay, so I'll stop it right there, we've got to the end of it.
end of the head there.
Let me poke around a little bit.
Let's see what else.
Every one of these just says untitled on it.
I'll just play one here and just see what it says.
See what song it might be.
That sounds really boomy.
It seems like there was one I liked about Track No. 3 or so.
You guys recognize that one.
That one is...
What when you get caught between the moon and New York City?
It's a Christopher Cross song, Arthur's theme.
Yeah, Arthur's theme recorded by Christopher Cross is a jazz arrangement of it.
Let's see what Track No. 4 is.
I think that's as time goes by.
I think there's also one of my own compositions on here to which I hold the copy, right?
So it can be safely played back.
Let's see. Where is that?
Okay.
I wrote a piece for Solo Piano.
Now, this is straight from a MIDI file generated from Lily Pond.
So this is not a live human performance that's been recorded.
This is just a computer generated performance that's being realized on an acoustic piano.
So it won't have that human touch that these other recordings have.
But it was a pretty cool way for me to get some idea what the piece was going to sound like on a real piano.
Because again, I cannot play this.
It's much too hard for me to play.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
A piece I wrote in 2006.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
There we go!
This is my Tarantella.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
This is my Tarantella for Solo Piano.
it records and plays back. So I'm going to hit records and I've got a disk in there.
And let's just see. I'll goof around for a little bit and then play it back.
Let's just please wait. Waiting. We're waiting. Okay. And it looks like the play
pause button is blinking. So I'll press it. There's a little beep. Presumably that
means we're recording. I don't see the time moving.
Yeah. I wrote another piece for piano that I can actually play. I'm going to try to play
it back. All right. Maybe that's enough. Let's stop. Let it do its thing. Writing to
the disk. Do not remove disk. It says. All right. Let's play back.
This is funny.
Okay. That was truly terrible. Anyway, you get the idea. It makes an absolutely
perfect copy of it. It's pretty amazing that this technology is from 1990 and it's playing
off of floppy disks. You know, they really knew what they were doing. Yamaha. I don't know what
else I want to say about this. It's not the kind of thing that anybody can just go out and buy.
These are very expensive. I think even in 1990, it was over $10,000. So I would suggest getting
one if that were at all reasonable, but you know, it's probably not unless you're really, really into
music. But it's a very cool thing and I thought you guys would appreciate the technology. I'll
put a couple of links and I think I will make a, I made earlier a quick video showing the keys
moving all by themselves and I'll post that on YouTube as well. So you guys can watch it. It's
pretty darn cool. All right. Well, I hope you've enjoyed hearing about the Yamaha disk clavier.
This has been John Culp in Lafayette, Louisiana. I'm unzipping my recorder pouch and I'm going
to press stop here in a second. I'll talk to you guys some other time. Okay. Bye-bye.
You've been listening to Hecker Public Radio at Hecker Public Radio.
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