The MAIN Screen

Take a look at the MAIN screen below.  This is a picture of the PSR-2000, but the screen on the PSR-2100 is almost identical. This is your keyboard control center.  Using the buttons on the left side of the screen, you can select a SONG to play (button [A]), choose to look at the Lyrics or Score of that song while it plays (buttons [B] and [C]), select the accompaniment  STYLE to use for your own playing (button [D]), and select an INTRO and ENDING for your chosen style (button [E]).

MAIN Voice

On the right side of the MAIN screen, you select the instruments you want your PSR-2100 to emulate (buttons [F], [G], and [H])!  You can select one MAIN voice and have that voice played over the entire range of your keyboard.  In the picture below, the GrandPiano is selected as the MAIN voice.  This is the default selection when you turn your keyboard on. (The PSR-2100 defaults to the BrightPiano.)

LAYER Voice

You can select an additional instrument that would play along with your MAIN voice, that is, you can have two instruments playing the melody.  The second instrument is called the LAYER voice.  In the photo here, Live!Strings are chosen as the LAYER voice. 

LEFT Voice

If you decide to split your keyboard (more on that later), you could have the right side of your keyboard play the MAIN voice (and perhaps also a LAYER voice) and the left side of your keyboard play yet a different voice, called, as you might suspect, the LEFT voice.  In the screen, shot the GalaxyEP electric piano is selected as the LEFT voice.

Turning Voices ON/OFF

You could have all these instruments playing at once, but you don't have to.  Notice those three buttons to the right of the MAIN screen labeled MAIN, LAYER, and LEFT .  The little light by the MAIN button is on, but the lights by the other two buttons are off.  This means the MAIN voice is ON, and the LAYER and LEFT voices are OFF.  Even though an instrument is selected for each voice, you will not hear that voice when you play the keyboard if the voice is turned OFF.  To turn it on, you press the appropriate button.  These are TOGGLE switches -- press to turn ON, press again to turn OFF.  Press the LAYER button and the Live!Strings will be ON; you will hear them along with the GrandPiano when you play the right side of the keyboard.  Press LAYER again and the Live!Strings are turned OFF.  If you are playing the keyboard and you hear NOTHING, one of the first things to check is whether all of the voices are set to OFF.

Selecting a Voice Part

The buttons on the right side of the screen next to the MAIN, LAYER, and LEFT windows are used to select a particular part. The MAIN voice is currently selected -- you can tell that because the GrandPiano is highlighted, that is, it is shown in reverse video.  If you want to select the LAYER voice, press the [G] button -- once, just touch it lightly -- and you will see that the LAYER voice is now highlighted. Press the [H] button and the LEFT voice is highlighted.  If you want to select a different voice, the first step is to select the type of voice (main, layer, or left) you want to change.

Selecting a MAIN Voice

If you press [F] again to select MAIN, and then press [F] once more (or, alternatively, give [F] two quick presses), the main screen will now switch to the VOICE (MAIN) screen. There you see the Grand Piano highlighted because that is the current MAIN voice. There are 10 voices in the Piano & Harpsichord category.  Here they are.  Select any of these 10 voices by pressing the corresponding buttons to the left or right of the screen. The PSR-2100 has 13 voices in this category, which takes two "pages" to show all the voices. (These screen shots are from the PSR-2000. See the lessons on the PSR-2100 panel voices and the PSR-2000 panel voices for a detailed listing of all the voices on each model.)

Try out the different Piano voices.  You can audition these voices by selecting the voice and then playing some keys on the keyboard.  That may not be a really good way to show how well that particular voice could sound.  Want to really test out these voices?  See that DEMO option in the bottom right corner, just above the UP option? In fact, you will notice a whole set of options at the bottom of the screen.  Each is located above one of the number entries ([1]-[8]) under the main screen.  The DEMO/UP combination is positioned right above the number 8 buttons.  To select DEMO, press the button Above #8 -- I'll call this the [8A] button.. To select the UP option, press the button Below #8 -- obviously, the [8B] button.

Voice Demos

Try out that DEMO button.  You will immediately hear your PSR-2100 or PSR-2000 start playing a short musical selection featuring the selected voice.  This can be a handy method of auditioning those hundreds of panel voices and giving you an idea of the kind of music that might be suitable for any particular voice.

Voice Category Folders

The UP folder refers to the fact that you are looking at the Piano&Harpsichord voice category.  All the voices in each category are stored in a separate folder.  If you selected the UP option, by pressing the [8B] button, you would see another main screen where you could select various folders, one for each category of voice exactly like the categories you see on the VOICE button section on the keyboard.

Let's look at another voice category.  Suppose you want to select one of the String instruments for your MAIN voice.  You have two ways to get to the STRINGS category.  You could press that UP folder [8B], which would take you to a screen showing all the VOICE category folders, and, from there, you could select the STRINGS folder.  Alternatively, you can simply press the STRINGS button on the VOICE section of the keyboard.  This will take you directly to that Strings folder that includes all the available voices in the Strings category.

Pages of Information

The VOICE screen for the Strings folder looks just like the Piano&Harpsichord screen.  But, compare the two screens carefully.  Notice that the name of the folder (category of voices) you are looking at is shown right below the 10 listed instruments.  Notice also that while the Piano screen only had one page of instruments listed, labeled P1, the Strings screen has four pages of voices, labeled P1, P2, P3, and P4. In the illustration shown here, the P1 page is highlighted indicating that you are looking at the voices on that first page. The Strings category includes 34 instruments.  This first page, P1, shows 10 of them. 

You would select the second page of voices, P2, by pressing the button Above the #2 below the main screen [2A].  (Button [2B] would be used to select the "CUT" option.)  Page 2 shows the next 10 voices (numbers 11-20); pressing [3A] selects page P3, which shows voices 21-30; pressing [4A] brings up P4 to show the final 4 voices, 31-34.  So, while pressing the [STRINGS] button brought up the Strings category of voices, you have to search through four different pages to review each of the 34 different string voices available in this category.  Notice also that the DEMO button is still available; you can demo any of these string instruments to see what they sound like.  If you have a PSR-1100 or a PSR-1000, you select voices exactly as described here.  The only difference is that the 1100 and 1000 do not have quite as many panel voices available.

File Operations

A "Voice" is really just a "file" in the keyboard. Similarly, each style included with your PSR is a separate file.  You can do a number of things with these files.  The file options you have are shown in the bottom row of this screen: (NAME (rename the file), CUT (move the file from this page to some other location), COPY (make a copy of this file that you can store elsewhere), PASTE (save a [cut or copied] file to this page), DELETE (erase the file), SAVE (save the file to a new memory location), NEW (create a new folder), UP (move up to parent folder).  (We have a separate series of lessons available that cover the PSR file system.  All of these file operations are explained in detail in those lessons.)

These file options are always shown on screens that deal with files.  Sometimes, only some of the standard set of file options will be available for a particular screen.  Options that are not available will be very dim indicating that they can not be selected.  In this screen, only one file option is available: COPY.  That is because all of these voices are PRESET voices, stored permanently in the keyboard, and cannot be changed by you.  The only thing you can do with the preset voices is make a COPY of the voice, which you can then modify as much as you want. And just where would you put that "copy" of the voice?

File Memory Locations: Preset, User, and Floppy Disk

The above question brings us to the memory locations that are specified by the three tabs in the upper right-hand side of the screen:  PRESET, USER, and FLOPPY DISK . You navigate from one tab to another by using the [BACK] and [NEXT] buttons. The PRESET tab is highlighted indicating that all of these voices are stored in the PRESET memory area of the PSR-2000.  They come with the keyboard; they are always there; you can not change, delete, (or add to) the preset voices.  The PSR-2000, however, includes 580K of FLASH memory represented by the USER tab. You can store information in this area and it will remain there even if power to the keyboard is turned off.  It is almost like having a (very small) hard disk in the computer. I say almost because the information won't stay there forever.  If you unplug your PSR for many days, the information in the FLASH memory area will eventually go away. (The PSR-2100 has twice as much FLASH memory as the PSR-2000.)

But you have yet a third option for where you might store a file: FLOPPY DISK.  A High Density (HD) floppy disk will hold about 1400K -- more than twice what you could store in the internal USER memory of the PSR-2000 and about the same as is available in the PSR-2100.  Thus, everything you may be storing in the USER area could very easily be copied to a floppy disk that could serve as your backup for this information.  Even if you lost all your files in the USER area because your machine was unplugged for a long time, you could restore the information by copying it back from the floppy disk to the user area.  See the lessons on the file system mentioned above for more information on floppy disks.  Right now, I just want to point out that the "file screens" will always show you the tabs (PRESET, USER, and FLOPPY DISK) where you can retrieve and, in some case, store your PSR files.

Well, now that you see how to select a MAIN voice, you have 800+ voices to test out.  Do not disdain those 480 XG voices.  You may very well find many voices there that you like as well as many that are not available in the panel voices.  Each of those voices is provided with its own little "demo," about 5 seconds of music.  If you add another 5 seconds to select a different voice and push the demo button, you could sample 6 voices in a minute.  That's over TWO HOURS, if you worked at it steadily and didn't take any rests -- and didn't get seduced into actually playing some songs with those different voices.  So, you see, just to understand what you have available is going to take quite some time.

The following two lessons show you all the preset voices in the 2100 and the 2000 as they are displayed in the various category pages.