Boston's Berklee College of Music is synonymous with excellent musicianship. Many ‘musicians' musicians' honed their craft in those hallowed halls. Always on the cutting edge when it comes to mentoring tomorrow's all-star players, the venerable school recently purchased five M-Audio DCP-200 digital console pianos for daily use by both faculty and students. M-Pulse got the inside story in a conversation with Jerry Smith, Technology Director for the Professional Writing Division that acts as an umbrella for song writing, composition, jazz comp, film scoring, harmony and contemporary writing production.

Given that Berklee is a music college, instruments are essential fixtures in faculty members' offices. “We're planning on switching over all the digital pianos in the office,” Smith says. “Originally we had acoustic pianos and that, as you can imagine, doesn't really work too well in a shared office. We went to synthesizers and they just didn't have great piano sounds—plus they had too many bells and whistles on them. So I started looking at putting digital pianos in these rooms.”

Part of the criteria was that the instruments had to be straightforward. “Most of our faculty want a simple piano that doesn't have a lot of buttons on it,” Smith explains. “99 percent of the time, instructors are sitting there with a student or simply trying to realize a harmony project. They just want a good piano sound. I think a piano that has a simple interface is much better than a piano that has more buttons on it than you're probably going to use…”

Read the full interview to find out why Berklee chose the DCP pianos

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