It's 9:20AM at my store. I got here at 9AM (I open at 10AM) and I've spent 20 minutes recording styles on the PSR2000. It's great! Here's some of the reasons.
first, I can select an existing style or select new and start from scratch. I can record up to 32 measures per variation (while fills are always 1 measure) and I record in realtime or steptime. While recording rhythm tracks I can push the rhy clear button to clear individual rhythm notes played incorrectly. It is really nice compared to the 740 which never let you change the length of the recorded style. You had to select a style that had either 1, 2 or 4 measures and then go and clear it before you could begin recording. Now you can hit the record key and at the bottom of the screen you select which part (rhythm, bass, acc.1, etc. you wish to record. After recording you can change the rhythmic feel- also known as groove and dynamics with many groove parameters. There is a beat converter which changes the timing of the beats to a selected value. A swing mode which produces a swing feel by shifting the timing of the back beats and a fine mode which selects a variety of groove templates to be applied to the specific section.
There is also a parameter called Dynamics that lets you control accents, range of velocity values for your styles that you have created.
Another cool mode is allowing you to assemble an accompaniment style by combining different elements such as rhythm, bass and chord patterns from existing styles and use them to create original patterns.
All and all a great style creator keyboard!
Next, the sequencer is easy to use and works great. I created a 16 track song in minutes by just hitting the record button and which of the 16 tracks I want to record in by looking at the bottom of the display and selecting one of the icons at the bottom. I also love that as you select a track a pop up window comes up and gives me all the options for recording a main, a layer, a pad, a left voice, rhyth, chord, pad, phrase tracks. This is much easier than on the 740 series. There is also now a dedicated metronome button on the panel so no need to go into function displays to turn in on or off. When you are done recording.....instant playback. No more having to wait for it to write on the disk. Also there is a function key that says save......you need to do this to save your song or when you turn off and on the keyboard, your song will be gone!
A great new feature is cut and paste so now on a arranger keyboard we have computer type operations for copying sections you've recorded on say 8 tracks wherever you would like them. This is done in the step record mode. By the way, step record lets you enter melody tracks, accomp tracks for those who like this method. You can edit note events (microscope edit), transpose tracks, Set up data(intial settings of the song- such as voice, volume, tempo), quantize, delte, mix the data of two channels and put the results in a different channel or to copy the data from one channel to another. You can even input lyrics for a song right on the keyboard! You can edit chord events. Parameters include tempo value, chord types including root note and on-bass note and many other parameters.
I think you can see this is pretty amazing!
Oh and George P., yes there is the arabic drum set and scale tuning which Yamaha gives you two arabic tunings pre-set and then you can make your own and any tuning can be saved on any registration memory so that hundreds can be saved and instantly called up.
I'm sorry if this post seems rather choppy because I'm trying to get it out as quickly as possible. Everyone should try to check out this keyboard. I'm sure it will be a winner! It already is in my booK!
George Kaye
Kaye's Music Scene
Reseda, California