Here are my thoughts on the Vidal, which I’ve had since late November.
There was a problem with my shipment— FedEx made a mistake and misclassified it as freight or something, and sadly it arrived somewhat damaged. On a day right before a holiday, Vidal owner Tom Rudnitsky drove up to where I am, 2 hours away, to replace the lid, which was cracked, and make sure it was OK. This was an awfully nice thing to do. A lot of good will, experience, intelligence, passion and soul go into the creation of the Vidal, and it shows. It is also built like a tank, and it survived the fall it evidently had experienced very well.
As is obvious from photos, the Vidal is gorgeous; in terms of beauty, craftsmanship, and the human touch, there is nothing else like it in this realm — on these terms it reigns supreme. Its design is radically transparent. You can open it up to get at the action — long wooden levers, like a clavichord’s, but with heftier counterweights — simply by lifting the lid. It’s an instrument you can easily feel physically connected to, and that’s a rare trait for electronic gear, especially a MIDI controller.
I think it’s important, however, to distinguish between the aesthetic and, one might say, spiritual virtues of the Vidal from some other pragmatic considerations.
First, in my case, a minor matter: despite all the care that Tom took with it, perhaps because it had been banged up a bit in shipping, as I began to use it, I soon discovered that the action made a variety of unwelcome noises due to friction between parts or other factors. Tom advised me how to fix some of them. A few which I lazily haven’t reported to him I have lived with, though I should address them at some point, and I’m sure Tom would help. None of them are functionally important, though — were they, I’d have stopped everything and dealt with them. I wonder whether the increased weight of the action, and the fact that it is made from wood, may come to involve more service or intervention to prevent these issues. (On the other hand, the action is so simple that it may be resistant to serious problems.)
More importantly, perhaps: several users have said that the Vidal feels just like a real piano, or more so than other controllers. I have to say that I don’t really agree with this. I go back and forth between it and a Steinway M, and the difference is significant to me. The action works on quite a different principle: as mentioned above, the Vidal’s is like a clavichord’s, essentially a simple lever, but unlike a clavichord, whose motion stops when a tangent at the far end of the lever hits a string, here the bottom of the key hits a force-absorbing barrier. At this point, there is a sort of thud which initially I found to feel somewhat abrupt. At first this made me feel hesitant to play loud, thick textures (though another attribute of the Vidal helps with this: it is heavy and, unlike lighter controllers, doesn’t shake when you throw yourself at it), and the noise of the action encouraged this reluctance. However, I’ve adjusted to this, and on the positive side, the action has a very nice toothiness, the aspect most reminiscent of a well-regulated grand action (and one where many controllers fall short), and is entirely without mushiness, which is more than can be said even of many acoustic instruments, so it lends itself very well to rhythmically and dynamically precise playing.
Ultimately, a controller of this kind, though a cousin to an acoustic piano, simply is not one, and it doesn’t need to feel exactly the same as long as players can do what they need with it and go back and forth between it and other pianos without undue difficulty. Acoustic pianos also feel very different from one another. In addition, what a piano feels like is a very subjective mixture of what the piano is, and how a particular person approaches it and interacts with it.
I have not been able to do side-by-side comparisons with my previous controller, a Kawai MP11SE, or with the various hybrid instruments now available from Kawai and Yamaha. I prefer this action to the Kawai’s, which had for me something of a “there is no there there” feeling, whereas the Vidal has a pleasurable sense of bite, with excellent haptic feedback. But I can’t honestly say that the Vidal enables me in practical terms to do something I couldn’t do with the Kawai, which in the end was controllable and reliable. Still, there is more to life and art than practicality, and I certainly don’t regret having such a beautiful, and beautifully conceived and made, instrument as an essential part of my daily regimen. It was worth it for me.
One clear, but small, deficit: the supported Studiologic pedal is less good than the Kawai pedal. I hope that an update will make other triple-unit pedals directly supported. If not, there are workarounds, and the Studiologic model is usable.
I would not urge the Vidal on prospective buyers on the basis that it would solve fundamental problems they have with playing MIDI controllers, just as I would not suggest that wearing an exquisitely hand-tailored outfit would keep you warmer in the winter. But I would recommend it to anyone for whom the price tag is not an obstacle who would appreciate and benefit from having such a graceful and well-thought-out instrument as a musical companion.
Excellent review. Regarding the pedal, I assume you know that the audiofront pedal adapter supports the Kawai optical pedal GFP3 which is way better than the Studiologic SP3D which is more or less the same FATAR pedal F-30 found in the VPC1 that many users have complained about. Your Vidal keyboard deserves it !
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