The internal preset styles in the PSR and Tyros keyboards may be just what you want, or perhaps not. You can adjust those styles although you will have to save the adjusted styles either in the limited USER area, on a FLOPPY in the PSR-2000/2100 and Tyros, on a CARD or USB in the PSR-3000, on a USB on subsequent keyboards or a hard drive (HD) on later Tyros models.
When you download a style, particularly one that may have been originally designed for a different keyboard, you may definitely need to adjust that style. Adjustment might be changing the volume setting of the instruments or even changing some of the accompaniment instruments themselves. The lessons in this section show you how to do this as well as how to create your own one-touch settings, which you can save with any style.
Before you fine tune any style, however, you may want to make sure the overall sound of your keyboard is set the way you like it for the room you normally play in. You do this adjustment by changing the Graphics Equalizer (EQ). We'll first take a look at adjusting your EQ and then look to modifying individual styles to sound the way you want.
Adjusting the Master EQ
The Graphics Equalizer, one of the tabs in the Mixing Console, is perhaps the most important setting for impacting the overall sound of your keyboard. The Master EQ sets the overall volume, and tonal quality, of the output of your keyboard. Gary Diamond, who performs regularly with his PSR, has used the PSR-2000 and the PSR-3000 for hundreds of gigs. Gary provides a brief discussion of the preset Master EQ types available in the keyboard and how you can create your own Master EQ settings. You will want to set your Master EQ before you start adjusting individual elements of a style.
Balance Control
How do you balance the sound between backup and solo instruments? This is a basic skill that needs to be mastered. This lesson shows you how to balance the sound between your right-hand voices, the left-hand voice, the accompaniment, the multipad and the microphone.
Accompaniment Voices
In tuning styles, you will want to try out different voices for the various accompaniment tracks. Dick Roberts has discovered a feature in the Yamaha keyboards that allows him to try out different instruments as he is playing a tune. He explains how in this article.
While your Yamaha keyboard comes with many preset styles (or bands, if you like), you may, eventually, want to adjust these styles. Or you may be interested in adding new styles from external sources, which may need to be tuned a bit to work well with your keyboard. The remaining lessons teach how to do this. The general content of each is described below:
The Mixing Console
Think of a "style" as a little band that accompanies you when you play. The band can have up to eight players. Each player has a set part to play, but they can play on a variety of instruments and they can play as loud or as soft as you, the arranger, dictate. You can even tell each player whether you want them to play or simply sit that round out. You give your band instructions by using the Mixing Console. This lesson explains how to use the Mixing Console to adjust the volumes of various style tracks and how to change the instrument used in any given track.
One of the areas that new users traditionally have problems with is learning how to "save" the adjustments they make to a style. If you change any of the one-touch settings, you can "save" the style with a new name and the next time you load the style, your OTS settings are there. However, if you change the tempo of a style or any of the accompaniment voices or volume settings, or the left-hand voice, you have changed the basic structure of that style itself. You must use a different method to save these changes. The required steps are laid out in this critical lesson.
Tuning Style Sections
A style can have four different main sections (A, B, C, and D) each a little bit different than the other. When you make adjustments using the Mixing Console as described in the lesson above, you instruct a player to use a given instrument, and play it at a given volume, in all four style sections. But you can provide even finer adjustments by varying the instruments and/or volumes in each section independently. This lesson explains how you do that.
Creating One-Touch Settings
One of the great features of the PSR and Tyros arranger keyboards is the ability to add four one-touch settings to any style. When you save that style, those settings are saved in the style itself. This lesson provides some tips on creating your own one-touch settings and explains exactly what parameters get saved when you save a keyboard setup in the OTS memory buttons.
This lesson shows a simple technique you can use to create a set of OTS registration files holding the OTS settings used in the preset styles of your keyboard. These files can then be used to replace the OTS from earlier keyboards or keyboards from other manufacturers with appropriate voices and combinations of voices from your own keyboard. The lesson uses the Tyros3 to illustrate and provides OTS registration files for Tyros3 owners.
Phil Hall explains what Digital Signal Processing (DSP) is and how you can use it to change the sound of instrument voices. Changes are made in the EFFECT tab of the MIXING CONSOLE.
This page updated on September 19, 2024 .