During his demonstration, Alex pointed out that constantly switching between the touch screen and the musical keyboard allows you to do things in a much more intuitive way. As a result, it means that for a lot of people it is an easy way to enjoy music. If you once studied piano and would like to get back into it, it gives you an easy way to do so. If you just like listening to music, this system will play back 35,000 songs stored on its internal hard drive. Or you can run a karaoke system: plug a microphone in, display lyrics on the screen and sing along while someone else plays along with the song. Entertain, educate, enjoy music, get into production level activities or create your own recordings-all of those things you can do with a powerful PC MIDI-studio environment-you can do much more easily and more intuitively with a Van Koevering Interactive Piano because of the touch screen.

With 35,000 songs worth of MIDI files on a 4.3GB hard drive, Alex pointed out that his staff calculated that if you learned a new song a week, your hard drive would hold enough songs to keep you busy for 600 years of music lessons.

Alex showed the audience just what you can do with some of these selections. With the touch screen, you could just listen to music. If you are having a party, you could use a software program called Cakewalk Virtual Jukebox to create a custom play list of your favorites. Or you can open Cakewalk and display the notes of any of the pieces that you like so you can learn to play them. You can slow the tempo way down and play it again and again. If you already read some music, you can load a file in this way, slow the tempo down, take your time learning it and then gradually speed the tempo back up.

The demonstration showed how the touch screen makes it easy for you to do a lot of operations that would be more difficult with a modular computer system. You can record a little bit of piano music of your own, once you learn the program, and then translate it into music from another instrument. To show how this works, Alex played some chords on the piano, recorded them, then played the piece back with a harpsichord in the background.

You can add the metronome click to your recording or you can do as Alex did and assign the metronome to be another sound, such as a clavier sound from the general MIDI-drum kit.

Once the music is recorded, you can edit it using the touch screen built into the music rack. If a particular note was a mistake, you touch and drag to select that note and then go up to the edit menu and select cut. Alex noted that he has been doing MIDI-sequencing for about 15 years. He started with a cheap 8-track sequencer, which only allowed him to do one track at a time. Now this process is so much easier with the integrated system and the touch screen. If you're going back and forth between working on the computer keyboard with the mouse and the musical keyboard, the editing operations can take twice as long. Of course, some of these operations are a little easier to do with the wireless keyboard, because you have to type information in the "edit text" field. But by using the screen, if you are transposing something if you're working on with a singer, for example, you simply load in a MIDI file, and use the touch screen to change the key from G to A, for example, using Cakewalk Express. You can also do 256 tracks of recording, with 128 general MIDI sounds on the internal sound card, with 32 voice, which actually now on the new models is 64 voice.

When you buy the piano, the basic package comes with Cakewalk Express 6.0, Cakewalk Virtual Jukebox, the karaoke software, and the Music Mall browser that you can use to go to the Van Koevering Web site. The Music Mall catalog lists all of the hardware and software that you can order from the Web site. Piano Discovery is one example. It gives you 10 volumes of music on CD-ROM that is equivalent to three years of piano lessons. It is structured with starting program, Piano Discovery for kids, and then has three sets of year-one adult programs.

There is also another piece of software called MIDI Soft Play Piano, which is a great learning tool with additional songs on it. It enables you to import your own MIDI files to create your own custom lesson plan. Between the 10 volumes of Piano Discovery and the Soft Play Piano disk with the import MIDI file capability, you could easily use those tools for up to five years of music lessons. Once you've gotten to the advanced levels of Piano Discovery and used a MIDI Soft Play Piano for a year, you will be ready to import MIDI files into Cakewalk Express and just read them off the screen. To learn songs, you can slow the tempo as needed, as demonstrated earlier.

Once you're in Piano Discovery, you can take lessons in the Schoolhouse, practice in the Bungalow, or perform in the Performance Hall. The Arcade has all kinds of games you can play to practice your notes. To help you set up your system and keep track of what you've done, Piano Discovery offers an Administration arm. Alex demonstrated the progression a beginner would go through using these aspects of Piano Discovery. The Schoolhouse shows you how to sit at the piano, hold your hands and play high and low notes. Then you can go into the Arcade and practice the notes in the shooting gallery. When you play the note correctly, you shoot the ducks. If you are concerned about cruelty to animals and you don't want to shoot ducks, you can use balloons instead.

When you are ready to play the song you've been learning, you go to the Bungalow and preview the song in the practice room. If you want to avoid the metronome, which is really the thorn in the side of most beginning piano students, you can play without it take as much time as you would like. When you play the right note, it is highlighted in color. If you've played the wrong notes, it shows you when you're getting warmer. Once you've prepared the piece, you can move on to the Performance Hall. If you've performed decently, you get a review in the paper, and when you play the piece correctly, you receive a certificate of achievement.

On the softer side of the spectrum, you'll get a brighter tone with less "attack." This means that you do not need to play very hard to get a very bright tone. If you go all the way to the harder side, you need to play much harder to get any brightness out of the instrument. Some people tend to play very hard while others have a lighter touch. This system allows you to adjust for either. Also, by adjusting the bass and treble of the instrument, you can hear how much range in tone is possible with the piano, something that obviously is impossible to do with an acoustic piano.

Another reason to adjust the acoustic piano like this is a practical one: some people like the piano in a certain spot just because it looks nice, not because it sounds particularly nice there. However, a piano tends to respond acoustically to the ambiance of a room, and that can have a dramatic impact on how the piano sounds. Now, you can compensate. You can sort of eat your cake and have it too with the Van Koevering because it allows you to have the piano in the most esthetically pleasing location in the room and adjust the sound to make it sound optimal no matter what its location.

The other screens of IMT give you the opportunity to play with a variety of other instruments. From the solo screen, you can play any of the 128 general MIDI-sounds as an individual solo instrument. You can, for example, choose a little acoustic nylon guitar or some organ or bass. Once you're in the studio screen, you can have a lot of fun playing music with a very simple user interface. If you don't like to read manuals, you may wonder what all the controls are, but the on-screen help will also lead you through whatever you want to do.

There is one other neat trick about the interactive piano-something you might associate more with a computer than a piano. You can reassign hardware to have various software functions. For example, you can reassign the functions of the piano's pedals. In the traditional functions, the right pedal is sustained, the middle pedal is sostenuto (prolonged notes), and the left pedal is soft. Those are the traditional functions of the piano's pedals. But you don't necessarily need a sostenuto pedal, so you can reassign the middle pedal to have another function, such as another studio instrument. You could go through a whole piece playing the piano, then you can come back and play something else using the pedal.

The accompaniment patterns are a great function of the studio. If you want to want to play a little bit of Bosa Nova, select that. The piano is harmony sensitive, so it will automatically change your accompaniment to what you want.

To sum up: You have a powerful MIDI studio that runs PC music applications in Windows integrated into a beautiful piano run by a touch screen. You have all the power and capability of computers and music integrated into a system that is really user friendly.

Now for the specifics. The piano cabinet is hardwood, which is handmade in Italy. The touch screen is built into the music rack. It houses a computer with a 333 mHz Pentium II processor; 128 MB RAM, upgradable to 384 MB; a 4.3 GB hard drive; a 4 X DVD ROM drove; a floppy drive; a 56K modem; a printer port; a VGA monitor port; MIDI in-out and through put; a touch screen (10.4" active matrix LCD); an audio system (200 watt, two-channel power amplifier, a pair of stereo 1/4-inch audio inputs, stereo 1/4-inch audio outputs; speakers: 2 1" textile dome tweeters; 2 5" non-resonant paper cone midwoofers; 2 10" paper cone woofers); and a tone generator (general MIDI compliant sound engine; upgradable sound and wavetable technology; 16-bit sound samples; 44.1 kHz; 64-note polophony).

The wireless keyboard receiver and a wireless keyboard uses a net serve, which works up to 50 feet away from the piano, useful if one person is inputting music and the other one is controlling the sequencer. If you're a singer and you would like to have custom accompaniments for your performance, you can hire someone to come in and play them and save them on your hard drive.

You can also go to VanKoevering's Web site using their custom browser, The Music Mall, which easily and automatically enables you to upgrade software. They are working at this point towards a day when there will be essentially "content on demand" at the Web site where you can select any material you like on demand and download it directly into your piano. At this point, for licensing reasons with the MIDI files, you order them on the Web and we send you floppies. The new piano also has a USB port. They are also adding some digital audio software that will enable you to also burn CDs from the system with a CD-R connected to the USB.

Now for the price tag. The upright piano version, the ensemble piano, the VIP1300, is $8000. The VIP1900 is $15,000. The 1950 is $15,750. If you have room for the full-size baby grand, the 5 foot, you might as well get the baby grand. There is no downgrading from one model to the next model. The only difference is that the top-of-the-line model has dual 10-inch sub woofers;, the other models having one 10-inch sub woofer. Other than that, all the capabilities with the touch screen, all of the computer hardware, all of its capability for running the software, all of those things are the same regardless of which model you get. If you have less room, you can buy the ensemble piano at a lower price and still get the same software and hardware.