Korg Havian 30 Digital Ensemble Piano

The home piano has sure come a long way...

By Craig Anderton

Before the Age of the Microprocessor, the centerpiece of many a living room was not a big screen TV displaying drivel, but an upright or even grand piano. (In some countries, like China and Arab Emirates, a grand piano has become the latest luxury status symbol.) My father was a drummer, and we had an upright piano in the house—not a Steinway for sure, but it worked and got me started on keyboards.

As we move further into the 21st century, owning an acoustic piano is prohibitive for most people due to smaller living spaces, noise considerations, expense, and a mobile population. Yet there’s still much to be said for having a piano in the house, so companies like Korg, Casio, Yamaha, Roland, Kawai, and others have worked hard to create electronic equivalents at a variety of price points that sound (and sometimes feel) much like a piano.

The Havian 30 is relatively slim, and light enough to move from one room to another.

This isn’t an easy task, as a piano is an extremely complex acoustical instrument that doesn’t produce sound as much as radiate it. However with better sampling technology and enough computer power to create more sophisticated algorithms, piano sounds continue to become more life-like.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Korg’s site has the full specs, as well as lots of audio examples. Here are the highlights. 

• Korg’s Havian 30 (pronounced hah’ – vee – ahn) is aimed clearly at the home or school, not the gigging musician or the guy playing a solo act in a bar with an arranger.
• The 88-key weighted action keybed with velocity gives an acoustic piano feel.
• Dual 25W amps drive the bass-reflex onboard amplification system with two 4” speakers.
• The Havian 30 draws upon Korg’s synthesis/sampling expertise to provide tons of instrument sounds (based on almost 600 instrument multisamples), and 64 drum kits (based on over 1,000 percussion samples). There’s also space for 256 user-edited sounds and 128 user-edited drum kits.
• Sounds include all the keyboards you’d expect (upright, grand, and electric pianos, harpsichord, organ, clav, etc.) but there’s also guitar, brass, strings (ideal for layering), bass, synth, a General MIDI set, etc.
• An auto-accompaniment engine with 420 factory styles (and slots for up to 1,040 user styles) folds in Korg PA-series arranger keyboard features.
• You can play back MP3 (and MIDI) files record, as well as record your playing and save as an MP3 file with three variable bit rate quality levels.
• Four stereo effects blocks provide 125 effect types, as well as a 3-band EQ for each track, and a master effects block with a limiter and 4-band parametric EQ.
• The piano sound emulates damper resonance; the package includes a damper pedal that supports half-pedaling.
• The optional ST-H30-BK keyboard stand adds about $150 to the $1,500 price but provides a good Havian 30 home for the home.

THE USER INTERFACE

Aside from visual appeal, the TFT color touchscreen simplifies navigation.

Anything designed for the consumer must have a transparent interface—it can be thorough, as long as it’s simple. Korg entered the touch-screen world early on with the Trinity, and the Havian 30’s 5" TFT color TouchView display provides a mature, understandable touch interface. Like the iPhone iOS 8 update, all the familiar elements are on the surface but you can dig deeper to find the tweaky/cool options.

There's a reasonable number of buttons...not overwhelming, but sufficient to access all important functions. This shows the buttons to the right of the main display.

STRENGTHS 

• I always start a review by seeing how far I can get without reading the manual (might as well simulate real-world users, right?)—and had fun just pushing buttons and listening to the sounds. It’s even possible to get pretty far into the arranger functions. However, you’ll miss a lot of the most interesting features if you don’t spend some quality time with the manual.
• There’s solid, helpful documentation. A DVD includes a one-hour video manual broken into 7 sections (also available here [http://www.korg.com/us/products/digitalpianos/havian_30/page_3.php]), as well as a PDF user manual. The printed quick start guide provides an excellent balance between simplicity and exploring deeper parts of the keyboard; more quick start guides should take a lesson from Korg on how to do this right. All documentation is downloadable (or with videos, viewable) on the Korg web site.
• Switching among styles and variations is gapless. If only all DAWs had audio engines this gapless…
• Korg knows sampling/synthesis, and it shows—the range and quality of sounds is excellent, and don’t have the “cheesy” quality you sometimes hear from arrangers.
• Korg also knows touchscreen operating systems. And for the “tight” screens (e.g., mixing) that aren’t “fat-finger-friendly,” there’s always the data wheel.
• The searchable SongBook database, with fields for name, artist, genre, and tempo (you can filter on multiple criteria), helps find songs and performance settings.
• The programmable pedal and resonance options add to the realism of the piano sounds.
• MIDI over USB is a more modern alternative compared to including a 5-pin DIN connection (which is not present).

There’s not a lot of I/O, but the USB port comes in handy.

• The USB port is suitable for storage (with no proprietary formatting requirement for USB sticks or drives) and computer connections.
• Being able to modify and record styles and create your own music makes this much more than a “set and forget” canned accompanist.

LIMITATIONS 

• No jack for soft or sostenuto pedal, although Havian 30 responds to sostenuto control over MIDI
• Takes about 30 seconds to boot because there’s quite a bit of data to load
• I experienced a few display freezes when choosing sounds, although this was rare and not reproducible. However the unit being reviewed has 1.00 software, and turning the unit off and on again solved the problem.
• Power comes from a “line lump” AC adapter—don’t lose it.
• You can run into external monitors, but have to do so via an adapter plugged into the headphones out.
• The joystick controller is small and doesn’t feel rugged.
• Theoretically the SongBook could be edited using editor software, but Korg has no current plans to develop an editor, so it would need to be a third-party solution.

CONCLUSIONS

If you’re interested in the Havian 30, the documentation linked to on the web site will fill you in on the details (which are considerable, and describing them would add several thousand more words to this review). Although simple on the surface and relatively easy to navigate, there’s also a lot of sophisticated functionality “under the hood”—so let’s cut to the chase about how this keyboard fits into the current market.

If you need to base your home piano selection solely on price, you can pay a lot less and still get a good-sounding piano (like Korg’s SP170s—about $500). There won’t be the options and the enclosure won’t be as stylish, but budding musicians will have a place to start that won’t break the bank. Despite being quite affordable the Havian 30 is a more high-end product, and seems designed to address a continuum of players—from little Justin or Heather just starting off with music, to parents who have (or don’t have) musical experience. You can dive deep into the Havian 30 by taking advantage of features found in contemporary workstations (choice of sounds, editability, and user options) as well as the creative kick-start and fun factor offered by arranger keyboards.

Although the styles and songs can’t avoid the “canned” aspect inherent in all arrangers, it’s easy enough to add variations, and the sound quality goes a long way toward creating a solid user experience. There may be some bias here; the way Korg manages to blend realism, clarity, and warmth in their sampled instruments has always appealed to me, and the Havian 30 is no exception. What I like about the M3, Radias, and Kronos is in ample evidence, and I’d be happy to use these sounds in DAW-based productions with no excuses whatsoever. Granted two 4” speakers aren’t going to sound like a Bosendorfer, but they give a good account of themselves.

Also, some of the five accompaniment parts that follow your chords are pretty basic, but others are quite sophisticated and a few are downright impressive. Just be aware that this is mostly about mainstream music; if you want an EDM or rap monster, this is not the droid you’re looking for.

There are also some extra educational dividends, like displaying a MIDI file as a score, and showing scrolling CDG lyrics if available (if not, you can associate a .txt file with a song to display lyrics, although they won’t scroll). You can also add markers to jump to particular places in a song for study or rehearsing.

There’s always a danger that when trying to create an instrument intended to be all things to all people, you end up with something that’s too costly for casual players and not interesting enough for more advanced users. The Havian 30 avoids this fate by having a surface layer that’s easy to use and fun; many users would probably be more than satisfied with only what’s on the surface. But for those who are willing to dig, going down a couple menu layers offers many possibilities, which benefit from a logical operating system and good documentation. I also assume the pricing benefits from being able to build on the R&D from Korg’s flagship arranger products, the sounds from their workstations, and quantity pricing on elements common to multiple Korg products, like the touchscreen.

For those who “just want a home piano,” the Havian 30 will likely be overkill—you can do very well for much less. But for those who want an 88-key weighted keyboard, lots of quality sounds, considerable flexibility, a self-contained sound system, and the fun of playing along with auto-accompaniment, the Havian 30 hits a sweet spot.

Buy at B&H

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Craig Anderton is Editorial Director of Harmony Central. He has played on, mixed, or produced over 20 major label releases (as well as mastered over a hundred tracks for various musicians), and written over a thousand articles for magazines like Guitar Player, Keyboard, Sound on Sound (UK), and Sound + Recording (Germany). He has also lectured on technology and the arts in 38 states, 10 countries, and three languages.