Want to produce very low notes

[Karl]

Hello all, I'm new to the forum. I can play the piano but I don't own a piano or keyboard. I want to purchase a modestly priced keyboard for home use, a Roland FP-30 type of keyboard price-wise (so under $1000). Whatever I get, though, I want to be able to produce very low notes with it, if that is possible, the 4 or 5 notes below the lowest A on an 88-key piano. I think I hear these notes in New Age music a lot and I'd like to be able to make them with whatever keyboard I buy.

Two examples of songs with notes like these are Dianna Reeves's "Long Road Ahead" from her Beautiful Life album, and harpist Hilary Stagg's "Before Time" from his Dream Spiral album.

I notice Roland makes small amplifiers with a subwoofer jack. My thought is that maybe I could connect my home audio subwoofer to such an amp, and, coupled with a keyboard that would produce the very low notes, be able to enjoy low pure sounds like I hear on the albums when i play the keyboard.

I'm unknowledgeable about keyboards, by the way. Even what I say about the low notes on the two songs I give as examples could be misinformed. But I would appreciate if someone could either set me straight or point me toward a keyboard setup like I describe. I have tried to decipher from online descriptions and videos whether this or that keyboard can produce the low notes, but it never seems to be discussed, and maybe it's not even possible.

 

[happyrat1]

What you are looking for is an 88 key keyboard.

Similar price range to the FP-30 is the Roland Juno DS88. As a bonus it's more than just a stage piano. It's also a synth capable of all the orchestral sounds and synths and pads used in New Age music.

If your genre is new age this is the keyboard I'd recommend.

Gary

 

[happyrat1]

BTW, there are no built in speakers on the Juno DS but you can connect to studio monitors, a keyboard amplifier, or even run it thru a good set of computer 2.1 speakers or your home stereo's AUX input.

All of these signals are line level compatible so all you would need are the appropriate cables and adaptors.

Gary

 

[Karl]

Thank you very much. I viewed both videos you provide. Tonight after I get home from work I'm going to download the manual for the Juno and read it to see exactly how to produce the low notes. And it's great to hear it's possible to run the it through my audio system. I do have an up-to-date audio receiver, the Yamaha RX-V579, with 2 bookshelf speakers and a 15 in Power Sound Audio subwoofer.

 

[happyrat1]

If your receiver has a tape monitor loop you can also run the keyboard thru a small mixer so that you can hear yourself play while you are playing a CD or the radio. I used that sort of setup years ago when I was starting out.

It should sound excellent thru your Yamaha receiver and 2.1 speakers.

Gary

 

[Karl]

Sounds super. I watched many videos and typed in many searches for info regarding notes below the A-0 but never found anything. They assume you know all about these things already. I certainly didn't. Even the videos that claim to be introductory were not informative. My last resort was to ask the question on this forum and it got answered right away. I did look at videos about the Juno 88, for example. Not knowing synthesizers, I certainly didn't learn much from Youtube. I just got more confused.

 

[happyrat1]

You have to realize that hardware and human hearing has certain limitations.

An average person in his teens or twenties can hear a nominal range from 20 to 20,000 HZ.

At the extremes of this range, human hearing drops off considerably and by the time you hit your 40's and 50's and beyond everyone has significant hearing loss at the upper and lower ranges of frequencies.

Most consumer grade electronics, including keyboards, can reproduce about 30 to 17,000 Hz faithfully but again at the extreme edges the signal strength attenuates and drops off significantly.

Speakers are generally the weakest link in the chain.

If you look at the Sound Pressure Level charts for your bookshelves you will notice that it is not a straight line but rather a parabolic curve dropping off at the extremes. Most manufacturers won't even publish this data these days because it makes their hardware "look bad" so they publish meaningless specs like "peak power" and doctored "frequency response" numbers.

The truth is that most keyboards, Juno included, have an octave shift button that lowers or raises the frequency of a key by either any number of semitones from 1 to 12 or a full octave or more to subsonic and hypersonic frequencies, but the chances of your equipment reproducing those notes faithfully are slim and you even stand a chance of blowing out your speakers when ultra low frequencies are played and higher order harmonics come into play.

Suffice it to say that playable music that can be enjoyed by most humans, if not dogs, lies in the range of 30 to 17,000 Hz.

The Juno is more than capable of fulfilling this need.

Gary

 

[Karl]

Very interesting. I'm 66 yrs old so I've probably lost a good deal of sensitivity to both highs and lows. All the more reason to get going on a keyboard, I don't have that much time left till it's all gone!

I read somewhere that the lowest note on piano, the A-0, is 27 Hz. I don't know for sure if the New Age notes I was talking about are lower than that. They may be within that 'zero' octave and not below it. I was just assuming they're below it because my subwoofer really growls and vibrates the chair I'm sitting on, the floor, and me when it reproduces them.

I never hear those very low notes in regular pop music or classical. In fact, the song I cite in my initial post by Dianne Reeves is the only song on that whole album that has any low notes like that. The other artist I cite, Hilary Stagg, has very low notes in almost everything he ever recorded though.

I can play pop songs or classical on CD for hours without ever hearing a very low note. But maybe pop and classical have not that much content in the 'zero' octave either. I have been assuming they probably do, and that the very low notes I hear in New Age are one octave below -- the minus-1 octave. Do you think I'm right about that?

In the two pieces I listed in my first post, my opinion is that all those low notes are in that minus-1 octave below the lowest A on the piano. But maybe I'm wrong.

I don't desire to produce any notes below the ones I hear in those two recordings, but if I'm right about them being below the lowest A on a piano, then they must be down below 27 Hz. The way they vibrate and shake everything, it does seem like they are below the lowest A on a piano. Yet they are pure, not muddled, and I can tell what note is being played. In other words they're musical, not just vibration, but they do vibrate very dramatically too.

 

[happyrat1]

I would suspect at 66 years of age that you are not hearing anything below 30 or 40 Hz if you can identify the notes and that your feelings about the lowest octaves are purely subjective if not imaginary.

Reproducing a piano's bass notes accurately on a set of loudspeakers has plagued sound engineers and electrical engineers alike for decades.

Subwoofers help, but their output is generally so distorted that their "sounds" are more often felt rather than heard.

The notes you are identifying in your New Age Music are more likely A1 or even A2 notes and possibly lowest octave as well but those would be felt rather than heard or at most a low growling rumble like a minor earthquake.

The only reason you may possibly be hearing the notes clearly are the higher order harmonics of whatever instrument patch is being used to produce them.

Nonetheless, if the question still plagues you I'd suggest visiting a professional audiologist and getting a thorough hearing test to see exactly what range your hearing falls in.

I'm 60 myself and though my hearing is still very good it's nowhere near as sharp as it once was.

Gary

 

[Karl]

I'm very thankful for all your good advice. Thanks so much for taking the time.

I downloaded and read the Juno DS88 manual tonight. It's very brief, 22 pages in English, but then it has seven more languages too. It only covers how to turn on and off the Octave Shift, and how to reset it, and tells me that the way the octave shift operates depends on the mode, whether you're in performance mode or patch mode. It says it shifts the octave up or down, and seems to say there is a three octave range, plus3 to minus3 octaves. But it doesn't say specifically wether it will go one octave lower than the low A on it's keyboard, but I think it's safe to assume it will.

There are four other documents at the website available for download for the ds88. I haven't read them yet but I intend to. So it's possible they will go into more detail where the 22-page owner's manual did not.

I'd like to ask a question though about the lowest sounds you say we're able to hear. If I can easily hear the lowest A on a piano which is 27 Hertz, why wouldn't I be able to hear the next six half steps below that, G, F, and E and their sharps and flats? You say 30 Hertz might be the limit of my hearing in the lower range at age 66, and that an audio system wouldn't reproduce sounds lower than that well, but that lowest note on a piano I can hear well, and it is reproduced well on my speakers. That is, of course, if low A is really 27 Hertz, as I've been saying. I got that number off of a chart of musical notes a while ago. I'm not completely sure it's accurate, so that might be the problem.

 

[John Garside]

Whilst it's true that as we get older we lose the higher frequencies, it's not so true that we normally lose low frequencies.
(I recently had a hearing test and this was confirmed by the audiologist when I enquired.)
It's not unusual for people in their late 60's and older to suffer hearing loss commencing at around the top notes of the piano. Mine is down more than 30dB at 5 kHz and I'm 71.
But, I have a sub-woofer (a Rel Storm III) that goes down to below below 20Hz. I can still hear low organ pedal notes (when they're there) that are probably below the 27.5 Hz of the low A of a piano.

 

[Karl]

I have been surprised how very few really low organ notes there are on CD. When I got my subwoofer I started listening to organ music just to be able to hear some super low notes but they seem to be few and far between. I got an Alexa and one day she suggested playing a station called "New Age Relaxation." Since then I have only been listening to New Age b/c those people really utilize the ultra low notes. It makes my stereo sound super. I would like to be able to play the piano with notes like those on the low end.

 

[Karl]

Another thing Alexa did for me was show me what a great thing Bluetooth is. I knew nothing about Bluetooth a few short months ago but I do have Bluetooth receiver, a Yamaha RX-V579. Alexa hooks herself up to that without being connected to it in any way. She actually turns the Yamaha receiver on and plays music through it without me telling her to do so. Indeed, I wouldn't have known how to tell her to do it.

But it's a great thing to not have to hook up Alexa with a cable to the receiver (which is possible) and having her do it automatically. When Gary (above) in these forums told me yesterday I could play the Juno DS88 through my home stereo, that immediately came to mind since I know some keyboards do have Bluetooth. I read the Juno manual last night and it does not seem to have it though. I notice it's a feature almost exclusively on home piano keyboards with cabinets for some reason.

 

[happyrat1]

In General if a keyboard adheres to General MIDI spec it is capable of a range of notes from 0 to 127.

Here's the frequency range.

The frequency range starts at MIDI note 0, C = 8.1758 Hz, and extends above MIDInote 127, G = 12543.875 Hz.

I can guarantee that virtually no piece of consumer audio gear can reproduce those extremes faithfully.

Gary

 

[Karl]

The chart on this page has the C below the lowest A on an 88-key piano at 16.3hz, the D right above it at 18.3hz, and the E above that as 20.6hz, F (only a half tone above the E) at 21.8hz, G at 24.5hz, and A at 27.5.

I think I can hear all but the C. But keep in mind, this is only my opinion about what I'm hearing. I do try to carefully consider what I might be hearing, but I am not claiming my impressions are accurate. For one thing, I can't be sure which notes I'm actually hearing because I don't have anything to compare it with, like a digital keyboard which is always in tune. So these are just my impressions. I certainly do defer to the more knowledgeable people on this forum.

 

[happyrat1]

C below the lowest A on a piano is approx 16 Hz.

MIDI Note 0 is exactly one octave below that or half the frequency value.

Again. While ANY MIDI keyboard can claim to reproduce this note, there;s NO PIECE OF CONSUMER AUDIO GEAR ON THE PLANET that can reproduce that note without horrifying distortion.

Gary

 

[Karl]

That does clarify it for me. Thanks again. So then I'm thinking, the notes I'd like to be able to play on the Juno DS88 would be the half dozen or so black and white (if they were on a piano) notes below the lowest A. That's all I would desire. Or let's say I would like to be able to make those notes down to C below the lowest A on the Juno 88, or whatever keyboard I would buy. Then I'm thinking, judging by what you told me yesterday, Gary, I would be able to play them through my home audio setup, and then I would have the same beautiful sound that gives me when I play New Age music with very low notes, with the advantage that I myself would be making it.

 

[Karl]

I would also like those very low notes to be bold and forceful, like they are in the songs I cite in the first post.

 

[happyrat1]

BTW, you could just as easily play all of these notes on a 61 keyboard or even a 37 note synth if you simply shifted the octave down 3 or more times.

Again, like I said, MIDI Spec allows for all of these notes and just about every keyboard has MIDI capabilities these days.

The only advantage to an 88 keyboard is a proper weighted hammer action touch and a wider range of realtime playable notes

Gary

 

[John Garside]

Commercial hardware to play back these low frequencies?
Well, there used to be one piece of kit that I could never afford, called a Rel Studio III, that went pretty far down.
It had two 10", specially prepared, downward facing Volt subs in it.
My local Hi-Fi shop had one on demonstration for some years. (Chair shaking bass!)
Apparently it's frequency response was 9 - 100 Hz (+/- 6dB). Yes, 9 Hz!
I suspect the only content that went that low was from films with VLF sound effects.
But certainly there are very few, if any, normal speaker systems that go anywhere near that low these days.