After many weeks of work, I have finally completed the last two parts of my Music Finder Project. I have just uploaded all the results to the PSR-2000 Tutorial site ( http://pages.prodigy.net/watersj/Yamaha2K/ ) . The primary end result of this project is an expanded Music Finder database for the PSR-2000/1000 keyboards (which could also be used by CVP owners). This release includes almost 1,900 records covering over 1,500 unique song titles. It also references 174 different styles in the PSR-2000, that's almost all that are available. In addition, I have replaced the keyword field with information indicating which fake book, or fake books, each of the 1,500+ songs can be found in. Using the Search features of the PSR2000, a user can, on the fly, create a subset of this database which contains only songs that are found in any of 60 some fake books on the US market. In fact, I have already created dozens of these databases and they are available at the site for download. For example, if you happen to have the Ultimate Fake Book, I have created a corresponding mfd for that book with over 500 records.

The MusicFinderView program from Michael Bedesen and the Music Finder View from Fabian were essential in being able to complete this project. I have also provided an extensive new lesson on how to use these utilities.

A Music Finder database with almost 1,900 records sounds like, and in fact is, a relatively large database. However, to complete this project I had to combine the song indexes from 60 different books that resulted in a list of 16,000+ songs. After standardizing song title formats and eliminating duplicate titles, I was still left with over 10,000 unique titles in all those books. You'd think there would be a lot of duplication among the books, but actually about 7,000 titles appeared in one, and only one, of the 60 different fake books. At any rate, I wound up with a master song file with about 10,000 entries and for each of those entries I had a list of the books each song appeared in. Every title available in the expanded Music Finder database had to be compared to this larger song list to find out what books the song was in and those book abbreviations added to the keyword field to produce the final result.

I hope some PSR-2000 owners find this useful. I know that in developing this and working with it, I found it very enjoyable to have records in the Music Finder database that, more or less, mirrored the book I was playing from. Since books are usually arranged with songs in an alphabetical order and the Music Finder database showed song titles in an alphabetical order, I could simply go from one record to the next and the corresponding song would be the next one in the book, or at least within a page or two. Then, without having to figure out any styles or instruments, I could merely start playing with an accompaniment that was recommended for that song. I found this particularly useful when playing in the Early Rock & Roll Fake Book since the songs there used styles I wasn't all that familiar with. It was a great treat to just try out a song and have a style (and tempo) that seemed to fit perfectly fine.

As another by product, I personally wound up adding 160+ songs to the total and, in the process, became much more familiar with the styles available in the PSR2000. I found quite a few new (to me) styles that were really pretty good! I hope other players will also enjoy playing from these databases.