Review:
Alesis Prestige Artist
$599 USD
In this article, I am going to tell you the 5 reasons what I love about the Alesis Prestige Artist. It is. a piano packed with upgraded features that intermediate and advanced piano players will appreciate.
Reason #1
Key Actions
The Alesis Prestige Artist has 88 full-size keys, fully weighted with a graded hammer action just like on a traditional acoustic piano. It has 4 velocity curves to choose from, ensuring the best fit for your playing style. While the action isn’t the quietest or the fastest around, it is one of the top 3 for digital pianos in this price category. You can confidently articulate nuanced pianissimo phrases to thunderous fortissimo passages. The keys have a glossy surface but would be better if it was matte.
Key Actions
Reason #2
Sound Quality
The Alesis Prestige Artist comes with 256 notes of polyphony which is rare for digital pianos at this price. It is very common in this category that the big established brands have as little as 64 notes of polyphony. For an intermediate-level keyboard, this is a huge advantage as you would not experience note dropouts while playing lush sustained passages.
Just for a little more the Prestige Artist gets twice as many on-board sounds as the Recital Grand.. The 30 multi-sampled sounds include 5 piano voices, 5 electric piano voices and 5 organ voices in addition to orchestral, synth and bass sounds. The default Grand Piano voice is detailed and is best suited to classical music whereas the Grand Piano 2 has a mellow tone and sounds great with ballads and slow smoky jazz pieces. The voices can be layered as well as split across the keyboard. You can also easily adjust the volume mix to suit the music you are playing.
The Prestige Artist includes an arpeggiator with configurable parameters in this keyboard which is surprising as this feature is not found on the Prestige Recital Grand. This arpeggiator gives an interesting twist to the many synth lead and bass voices. To simulate various performance environments you get 5 configurable reverbs. The Prestige Artist is unable to save user presets but it does remember the setting set when you switch it off
Sound Quality
Reason #3
Design and User Interface
The Alesis Prestige Artist has a unique design, taking retro design cues from the Rhodes Electric Pianos popular in the 70s. This design results in the instrument panel facing the player which is significantly more ergonomic and is a breath of fresh air in the sea of black box digital pianos everywhere.
Good materials were used in the construction and the keyboard feels robust making you more confident when bringing on the road. The tactile confirmation each button gives and the encoder knob is absolutely brilliant. The encoder knob is intuitive as you turn the knob to scroll through various functions and press down on the knob to select parameters.
The Prestige Artist has a LCD with a high contrast OLED screen that is visible even under direct sunlight compared to the cheap LCD on the competeting brands. Alesis has taken a great amount of though into the user experience as you would not require you to look at a user manual to navigate around the piano.
The Prestige Artist has a dual headphone jack which faces the player instead of the rear panel making it more convenient and accessible. With 2 different sizes ports it allows you to use any pair of headphone without worrying about adaptors.
The Stereo ¼” TRS outputs is great for hooking up to a more powerful PA system making this keyboard a great portable candidate for gigs.
Also, the Prestige Artist come with the standard features that you can expect on all digital pianos these days. You can find a music rest, a metronome, 10 demo songs, a USB MIDI port, a single song, single track recorder and a lesson mode which splits the keyboard sound into 2 identical parts so a student can emulate a teacher during lessons.
As the Prestige Artist is a premium model, you get a metal sustain pedal instead of the plastic switch found on the Prestige Recital Grand.
Design and User interface
Standard features
Reason #4
Speaker System
The Prestige Artist has a great on board amplification crammed into a microarray of 8 speakers consisting of 4 woofers and 4 radiators producing 50 watts of amplification to deliver the power necessary to do justice to this speaker system with keeping its compact form factor
Speakers
Reason #5
Free Lesson Software
The Alesis Prestige Artist comes with free lessons worth at least a few hundred dollars for piano students of all levels. You get 60 lessons on “Melodics”, 3 months of subscription with “Skoove” and 2 months of live video classes from TakeLessons Live. After these free bundled classes, a beginner would have a better idea on the music education journey he would like to take.
Free lesson software
Conclusion
The Alesis Prestige Artist is a huge upgrade from the Recital Grand. The features and design is catered towards piano player of an intermediate and advance level making it really stand out.
I hope you found my review of the Alesis Prestige Artist useful! Do check out the links provided in this article for the latest and most updated information and prices of the Alesis Prestige Artist. Do take a look at my other articles to find the best and most suited instrument for your personal need.
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