Review of the CASIO WK-110 keyboard

Introduction

Hi there! It's me again. This time, I will tell you something about my new keyboard CASIO WK-110. I have had this instrument for about 2 months now. I know, it is not so long, but I can share some experiences and opinions I got so far. So let's look at this puppy :-)

Unboxing

Once, you order this keyboard, you will get a huge package, which contains:

• the keyboard itself
• sheet (score) stage
• a songbook and as usual some useless papers and a CD with drivers for connecting it to a PC

Are you missing something? Yeah, you are right, you need another piece of puzzle. Please be aware of the thing, that there is no AC/DC adaptor included in the box! You have to buy this separately.

Another thing you will probably need, but is not necessary to start playing like at least like a kitty is a piano stage and a comfortable chair. If you are not a beginner, you may want to buy a pedal, which can be connected via standard “big jack”.

It wasn't all so expensive, but not so cheap as well :-) There are the prizes:

• keyboard + AC/DC adaptor - $370 / 250€
• "doubled-X" Bespeco CROCODILED piano stage (I really like Bespeco) - $68 / 46€

I had some chair and pedal at home, so there was no need for me of buying that.

Let's roll!

After unpacking, putting the keyboard on a stage, connecting the AC/DC adaptor and pressing the “Power” button, you can finally play. There are some highlights for this piece of hardware:

• 76 piano-look-and-size keys
• 515 sounds and 120 accompaniments
• 32 tone polyphony (16 with stereo sound)
• other ordinary things like Split, Layer, Transposition, Tuning, Recording memory, Touch Response, …

If you like the piano best, you may be glad to see the number of keys. Sixty-one, which can be found on ordinary keyboards is not enough for many of players. This one has 76 keys, which is an octave short than a grand piano and for me is enough :-) There is no hammer keyboard, so the feeling is not so good like a grand piano, but having the price in mind, it could not simply be accomplished. There are also many sound registers, but I guess you will use “001 – St.GrPno” for the most of the time like I do :-)

In the keyboard, there is one hundred songs, which can be learned by integrated educational system. In my opinion, this system is not so good. The Yamaha's light-keys are better, but suck anyway :-) For this case, there is a paper songbook - it includes all of the 100 songs (except for the first two – some copyright issues I guess).

Pros

• 76 keys, which is the best thing in the world, if you really wanna play
• great sound
• price

Cons

• The LCD display is nice, but if you wanna read from it, you have to lean. There is no way of reading it while playing and using educational system is not good as well. This is actually thing I do not care about much, because I just set it once and play without a need of setting something again. And, I can read music sheet, so no educational system needed too :-)
• Keys click louder when pressed than on other keyboards. This is bad if you like to play at night like I sometimes do :-) For normal ordinary playing during the day, it is okay.
• The switching button (normal and types of accompaniment) sucks. It seems to be done in fifteen seconds by a monkey, because even a fly can move it and sometimes, the keyboard just switches the mode itself, which sucks, because you just finish one song, want to start another, but pressing keys on the left side does not have an effect. I will probably send it to service centre, if problem still occurs in upcoming weeks.

Connecting it to the PC

• There is also a possibility of connecting it to a PC. You can just use this keyboard like a MIDI player and record your music as well as do some sheets :-)
• If you ask, how it works in Linux, the answer is: Perfectly! ALSA detects it automatically, so there is no driver installation needed. If you have some application installed (for example Rosegarden), you can just plug & play :-)
• If you ask, how it works in Windows, I have no idea :-)

Conclusion

If it wasn't for the problem with the switching button, it would be a really good keyboard. I will see, what will happen - if they will fix it or not. I hope yes. The first and the second issues described are not so important to me. To end this all up, I can say, I am really satisfied with my new instrument.