With over 63,000 items for sale, including a range of pianos and keyboards guaranteed to make your fingers twitch with excitement, and online guides to help you make the right choice every step of the way, the cornucopian site Gear4music is an unparalleled treasure trove of musical riches. Warwick Thompson finds out more.
If you have ever gone to a website to find out some utterly crucial bit of information – the number of previous episodes of Coronation Street, for example, or the year that Love Island was first screened – and then found yourself following fascinating links-within-links to Peruvian insect populations and medieval female poets until your head is spinning, then I’d say to you ‘Be afraid… Be VERY afraid’. Because there’s a site which is such an Aladdin’s Cave of delights, that once on it, you might very well never leave. You’ll say, ‘I’ll just pop on to Gear4music to see what Bluetooth headphones / piano stools / portable keyboards they have’ and then end up hours later drooling over hundreds of unexpectedly must-have treasures. It’s a real online rabbit-hole, in the best possible sense. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Founded in the UK in 2003, and now with a million active customers and a wow-factor annual revenue of £144m, Gear4Music is the largest retailer of musical instruments and music equipment in the UK. It stocks Yamahas, Kawais, Rolands and plenty of other digital keyboard brands, but also offers its own in-house collection of digital pianos, such as Gear4music and G4M. And within this own-brand range, they have just introduced an excellent premium collection called G4M Sonori. Protected by the high quality-control guaranteed by such a successful retailer jealous of its reputation (nearly 90% of reviews on Trustpilot are five-star), Gear4music is clearly cock-a-hoop to be offering this extremely enticing – and competitively priced – range of instruments, and want the world to know about it.
'Gear4music’s site is such an Aladdin’s Cave of delights, that once on it, you might very well never leave'
And if the following makes a difference to you – as I confess it does to me – then you also might like to know that the Sonori range was designed in the UK by Gear4music’s local team of engineers. Always pleasing to read about a British success story, don’t you think?
What's in a Sonori?
Sonori pianos are available in three sizes – a low-top upright (rather like a narrow writing desk), a high-top upright (the shape of a standard stringed upright), and classic baby-grand size. The first two sizes come in two alternative finishes, a very attractive satin black or stylish polished ebony: the mini-grand is in polished ebony only.
I should say at this point that I use the term ‘keyboard’ and ‘piano’ synonymously in order to vary repetitions of diction: but on the site itself, an interesting blog post suggests that in some spheres they are treated differently. (A keyboard need not have weighted keys, says the author, for example). But for this article, I’ll bang my own lexicological drum, to mix a metaphor.
Whichever size of Sonori you choose (the Digital Grand model is pictured at the top), the playing feel of all of them is designed to be exceptionally natural, and as close as possible to an acoustic stringed instrument. The keybed is fully weighted (many comparably-priced keyboards offer only semi-weighted keys, which – I speak from experience here – can feel rather taxing for one’s expressive needs) and designed around a carefully engineered spring mechanism. There’s even an adjustable key sensitivity, to find the touch just right for you, and the action all comes with reassuringly realistic pedals.
The whole caboodle is controlled by an intuitive touchscreen, so that – even in the middle of your Bach fugue, or your funky hip-hop arrangement of the theme from Coronation Street (which has 10,230 episodes, at the time of writing, if you’re interested) – you can switch sounds, alter key weighting, or adjust volume. Pretty much anything you can think of, really. The menu is designed to be easily navigable, and as user-friendly as possible, so that you can focus on the most important thing: the music making.
And on that note, it’s worth noting how impressive the sound system is. Powered by the DREAM audio engine, a cutting-edge system designed in France, it is packed with 42 high-fidelity pre-set sounds, of which 24 have been crafted in collaboration with XLN Audio, one of the leading producers of digital audio for music production. You can theoretically play an incredible 256 notes at the same time – if you grow a few more fingers first, of course – to create multiple polyphonic effects too.
It’s worth noting that you can make a ‘custom bundle’ when purchasing these keyboards, by adding an adjustable stool and/or headphones to the package: buying them together creates a discount.
The Keynote in Light Oak
As I suggested earlier, if you head to Gear4music.com to check out the Sonoris, you’ll very likely find many more items to tempt your eardrums. I can’t resist flagging up a very stylish matte-black keyboard called the Keynote Contemporary Digital Piano (see above) which comes in a bundle with an elegant stool which wouldn’t disgrace a mid-century Scandi design museum. The instrument offers slightly fewer features than the Sonori range, and this is reflected in the price, but looks equally terrific with its light and airy base. There are plenty of videos on the site demonstrating many of the products, including this one, so you can hear for yourself the impressive quality of the sound too.
So head along to Gear4music to see what treats are waiting to tempt you. And expect the unexpected.
