Personalizing Table of Contents

Making Your Kind of Music

These lessons show you how to go beyond using the PSR-2100/2000 with only the voices and styles that come preset within the keyboard.  They explain how you can adjust settings in your keyboard and arrange your songs to sound just the way you want them to sound.

Currently there are four main topics under Personalizing Your PSR:  Registrations, Adjusting Styles, Creating New Styles, and Editing Songs. Actually a fifth topic could be Adjusting Voices, but since there is only one lesson (on DSP), I have listed that above under Creating New Styles.  You can click on any of the links in the Table of Contents above to go directly to that lesson. In addition, there are PREV and NEXT buttons on each page that you can use to go directly to the next (or previous) lesson in the series. The Lessons in each section are summarized below.

Registrations

It wouldn't be much fun setting your keyboard up to sound just the way you want it if you had to do that every time you wanted to play a song.  But you can save your keyboard setup.  You do that in any of the eight available Registration buttons you see on your keyboard.  In addition, that set of eight registration setups is saved in one individual registration file and you can have as many registration files as you want.  The lessons here provide step-by-step instructions on how to save and load registration files.  They also provide sample registration files you can use and different strategies you might use in setting up your own registrations such as saving 8 song setups in one registration file or using a registration file to have up to 8 setups for a single song.  There are sample registrations that show you how to modify the internal styles by putting your own left hand voices in and adjusting the tempo as you want and saving these in "category" registration file.  You are also shown how to use a registration file to store your own favorite left-hand and main/layer voices so that they can be available for instant use for any style that might be loaded. Finally, PSR-3000 users will be happy to see Frank(Seeker) Blecha's detailed step-by-step instructions on how to setup PSR-3000 Registrations.

Adjusting Styles

There are some terrific preset styles included with your PSR.  But you don't have to restrict yourself to simply using the style, with its associated one-touch settings, as it comes from the factory.  You can adjust that style in many different ways to suit your tastes.  In addition, you may download styles from the Internet that were originally for some other keyboard and are now in a format for your keyboard.  But they don't sound quite right.  You can fix them up.

Before showing you how to "tune" your style, we explain how you can have a dramatic effect on the overall sound of your instrument by changing the Master EQ (graphics equalizer) settings. Next, these lessons explain how to use the Balance Control to adjust the volumes of all the parts that make up your songs -- main voice, layer voice, left hand voice, multipads, accompaniment.  The Mixing Console can also be used to adjust the individual volumes (and instruments) used in each of the accompaniment tracks.  Of course, all of this tuning is lost if you don't know how to Save your new style. You can even fine-tune individual styles so that the voice used for any particular part varies from one variation to another.  Everyone has their favorite instruments and you may prefer different instruments for a style's One Touch Settings than those supplied with the style.  You'll learn here how to create your own One-Touch Settings

Creating New Styles

By using features in your keyboard, you can even expand a two-variation style you may have downloaded from an earlier PSR to have 4-variations complete with OTS.  If you want to be even more creative, you will learn how to use the Assembler to mix and match parts from various styles to create your own personalized styles. In creating "your" own style, you can also copy the Intros, Endings, or Fills from a different style. For those really ambitious musicians, we provide some tips on how to go about creating your very own styles part by part. And, finally, you can even learn how to make your own multipad files.

Adjusting Songs

You've just used Quick Record to record a song and it's perfect -- well, almost.  It just needs a little editing.  The lessons in this section will help you do that.  You can learn how to adjust the volumes in a midi file, how to actually change the voices used in the midi, and how to change the tempo of the song.  The PSR Song Creator is a powerful tool. Phil Hall provides some tips on how to use this editor to modify a midi file. You can even use it to change the volume of a single track in the middle of a song. Once you have all that set up correctly, you may also want to know how to put lyrics in a song.

Adjusting Voices

Our latest addition to this section is launched with a lesson on the Digital Signal Processor (DSP) in your PSR that can be used to modify the sound of individual voices as well as the entire keyboard.