Yamaha CP-80

Name: Yamaha CP-80
Brand: Yamaha

A stage piano that lived on the road, in the racks, and on the records. The documentation here comes almost entirely from the engineers who plugged one in.

Overview

The CP-80 shows up in the surviving documentation less as a product and more as a recurring credit. It's a line item on somebody's input list, a DI channel on a Midas desk, a keyboard a touring player insisted on having on stage. Nobody was writing ad copy about it in the sources that survive here. They were just using it.

The clearest picture comes from an Air Supply tour document. The stage-left keyboard rig ran a Yamaha CP80 through a second 25-input Midas board. It shared the desk with a pair of Yamaha DX-7s, and the keyboard mix was sweetened with an EXR Exciter patched across the stereo subgroup output. The CP80's channel got its own treatment: a model 622 EQ feeding a model 160 limiter. The synths next to it were running comparatively naked.

The piano also turns up in a Roxy Music tour document. Guy Fletcher's rig had two Roland Jupiter synthesizers, a Solina string synthesizer, a Korg organ, and a Wurlitzer electric piano, all funneled through a Yamaha 12-channel mixer, with the CP-80 in that same company. The engineer took a direct input on each individual keyboard instrument to keep the signals clean at the desks. So the CP-80 was treated as a source worth isolating, not blended into a single keyboard submix.

Then there's the Jermaine Jackson session. The stages on the warm-up dates couldn't accommodate the size of a conventional grand, so Jackson used a Yamaha CP80 electric grand piano instead. When the actual digital session came around, he insisted on a real grand.

Another appearance is in a piece on speaker-system design and touring sound reinforcement, where a full Lab-Q flown system for a Bob Seger concert is documented. The CP-80 shows up there as part of the touring setup, on stages big enough to need flown arrays and 25-input consoles.

One more detail is easy to miss. In the Roxy Music setup, a saxophone was fed into a small Yamaha self-contained 6-channel mixer, sweetened with a Roland Space Echo, and then run through Yamaha speaker cabinets, one of which was miked. That's a completely different signal path from the CP-80's, but every source in that setup got its own chain.

The documentation here is almost entirely from the engineering side - input lists, console layouts, miking diagrams - rather than from reviews or spec sheets. That means this page can't give the keyboard range, the action type, the dimensions, or what it cost. What the sources do show is that the CP-80 was a fixture on professional stages through the early 1980s, that it was routinely given its own EQ and limiting, and that at least one major artist preferred a real grand when the venue allowed it.

Contemporary advertising for Yamaha's electric grand pianos emphasized that the company's acoustic grand-building experience informed how the electric models sounded and felt. It positioned them as instruments that behaved like their acoustic counterparts rather than as conventional electronic keyboards (Mix, May 1980, p.104).