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You will learn a lot about how you can push buttons on your keyboard and set it up to use the right style, at the right tempo, with voices adjusted the way you think they should be to play a particular song. This is great for people who like to "tinker" with their keyboard and adjust settings carefully until they get exactly the sound they are looking for.

Others, however, just want to play music and prefer to not spend a lot of time searching for the right style and then adjusting other settings on their keyboard. For these users, the Yamaha Music Finder system will be a great tool that gets them off and running with minimal effort.

Included in your keyboard is a Music Finder Database (MFD) with hundreds of song titles. Simply select a song from the list of songs and your keyboard is ready for you to start playing that song. By pressing one button - the [Enter] button - to select the song you want, you can now play a chord and an introduction to that songs starts, at just the right tempo, and it leads you right into the main melody. Of course, you are the one who still has to play the song, but the style will be right and the instruments will be close enough to sound fine with that song.

This series of lessons will explain how this Music Finder system works. The system was introduced with the PSR-2000 and has continued, basically unchanged, to be a part of the Yamaha arranger keyboards introduced in the past decade. No matter what Yamaha keyboard you have, you can use these lessons to help you understand how to get the most out of the Music Finder feature.

There are eleven lessons in this section. A sub-menu is shown under the Music Finder button for each of these lessons. You can review the lessons in order, or simply jump to an area where you would like to learn more. The lessons here provide an introduction to the Music Finder system and how it works, an explanation of the Music Finder database files, how you can load a new file or save the current file to your USB or hard drive. User options, which help you find and select songs as well as understand and modify the basic information stored for each song, are covered in some detail.

If you start relying heavily on the Music Finder to arrange your performances, you may want to make a lot of changes to the database to tailor it to your own needs. This is where an external utility will become critical in working with your Music Finder database(s) on your personal computer. A separate lesson is provided that covers Michael Bedesem's MusicFinderView program, an excellent tool for working with a Music Finder database, modifying records, creating new databases, and converting databases designed for one keyboard to a format that you can use on your keyboard.

You can, of course, modify existing Music Finder records or create new ones yourself. But there are other ways you can add to your Music Finder databases. One way is to use Yamaha's Internet Direct Connection (available to Tyros4 and PSR-S910/S710 and some other models) and the Music Finder+ system to download additional records and a lesson will show you exactly how to use that system.

The next lessons provides an example of a specific Music Finder database and provides some tips on how it was created. The "Fake Book MFDs" lesson gives you 50 fake book specific Music Finder databases that you can download and use in your own keyboard. Finally, if you want to use the Music Finder database to hold your gig lists, Joel True provides a simple and flexible technique you can use to store your gig lists in the MFD.

The Music Finder feature is a great asset for many users. However, it only stores a limited amount of information for any particular song setup. If you do like to tinker with your keyboard setup, the next section, on Registrations, explains how you can save almost all the settings you can make on your keyboard so that they are instantly available in a registration file.


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This page updated on September 19, 2024 .