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CCRMA’s Disklavier MIDI Player Pianos

CCRMA has three Yamaha Disklavier MIDI player pianos:

Power on

MIDI Usage

MIDI IN Port

There are two mutually exclusive ways to get MIDI into a Disklavier:

  1. “MIDI”: hardware MIDI over a 5-pin DIN MIDI cable (coming out of a MIDI interface or MIDI controller) plugged into the brain

  2. “USB”: MIDI-over-USB with a USB cable coming out of a computer and plugged into the USB-B port on the brain. (The brain also has some USB-A ports but these are only for USB flash drives containing MIDI files.) In this mode the disklavier brain becomes a USB MIDI interface your computer should see. (If not then try downloading the drivers from Yamaha)

You must choose one of these two modes via the brain’s user interface, using the handheld remote control. First press “setup” (recording studio) or “menu” (Stage), then scroll down to and select “MIDI”, then for the “MIDI IN Port” field select “USB” or “MIDI”.

(The Disklavier’s MIDI output, telling your computer which keys a person played, always comes out via both hardware MIDI and MIDI-over-USB; this setting is called “MIDI IN Port” because it controls how MIDI comes into the Disklavier.)

MIDI IN Delay

The other important setting for how a Disklavier handles incoming MIDI is what they call “latency”. Of course in general latency is bad and nobody wants it, but the issue is that when playing a note, it takes a certain amount of time from when the hammer starts moving until it hits the strings, and it takes longer for quieter notes to sound because the hammer moves slower. Because of this, Yamaha give you the option:

When done


This page of CCRMA documentation last committed on Mon Nov 13 16:58:37 2023 -0800 by Matthew James Wright. Stanford has a page for Digital Accessibility.