The Yamaha PSR-7000 and up have special support for MIDI pedals, and by using Keyboard Split one can get the effect of an Upper and Lower Manual from just the one keyboard. I have a set of Fatar MIDI pedals, but wish I’d gotten the Roland instead: the Fatar ones have fewer controls and no velocity response. But they are a couple hundred dollars cheaper.


My PSR-7000 can accept input from MIDI pedals on any one MIDI channel (I use Channel 11, which is also the default output channel for the Bass part of Styles), and use it for any of the following uses:


  • Manual MIDI bass — just like an organ!
  • Auto MIDI bass — pedalboard bass changes the “Bass Root” of a chord played with an Auto-Accompaniment Style (thus allowing chords such as C7/G, or more easily specifying that A, C, D, and F is supposed to be an F6 and not a Dmin7), sort of like using Fingering 2 mode (where the lowest note is always the Bass Root) but without having to allocate nearly two whole octaves to the Auto-Accompaniment split part of the keyboard, leaving more notes for other things.
  • Panel Control — perhaps the coolest of all! Transforms the MIDI pedal board into thirteen assignable footswitches, able to toggle or trigger just about any binary or one-shot setting on the keyboard! You can assign pedal keys to do things like, say, pressing F for Fill-In #1, F# for Fill-In #2, B for a Rhythm Break, Eb for Ending #1, E for Ending #2, low C to activate previous Stored Registration, high C to activate next Stored Registration, other notes to trigger such things as Multi-Pads, toggle Right-Hand Harmony on and off, play any individual drum sound, etc. etc. etc., while still using the two available Foot Switch jacks for the usual Sustain and some other function!
  • A sub-mode of Panel Control lets you play Auto-Accomp. Style chords with the MIDI pedals -- you could, for instance, assign C and F Major, Gdom7, A and D and Emin7, etc. to the respective pedals, thus having a typical chord-set for the Key of C Major (or likewise adjust for any other Key). Then you can play full two-handed piano-style music with riffs and arpeggios and even piano silences that thus wouldn’t be able to trigger chords using the otherwise-nifty Full Keyboard Auto-Accomp Mode, and still have Auto-Accompaniment that changes chords when you want! (Of course you can do something similar by using the Chord Sequence feature of the Multi-Pads, and both methods require substantial pre-show set-up and thus couldn’t easily be used for surprise request songs in a live performance.)

The PSR-8000 and 9000 maintain most of these abilities so far as I know, though they may call them different things.