Yamaha's Tyros2 pulling all stops
Yamaha's new keyboard taps latest technology to create hundreds of realistic sounds.

By TAMARA CHUANG
The Orange County Register


MUSIC TO HIS EARS: Mark Anderson, a marketing manager with Yamaha in Buena Park, demonstrates the company's Tyros2.

BUENA PARK � Mark Anderson plucks the guitar strings so naturally, you hear every movement his fingers make. The twhap of fingers lifting off the strings. The zwooop of his hand sliding up and down the frets.

Only thing, Anderson isn't playing a guitar. He's playing a fancy new keyboard in a storage room at the Yamaha Corp. of America headquarters in Buena Park. He switches to trumpets.

"Listen to this," says Anderson, a former studio musician, as he tweaks settings on the Tyros2.

He pushes a pedal on the floor, and there's a gasp. Literally. The sound of a person gasping for air.

"Hear that," asks Anderson, Yamaha's marketing manager for portable keyboards. "This has the human touch. It's so much more realistic."

The Tyros2 is turning heads in the electronic-piano genre sometimes dismissed as "granny's organ." Keyboard Magazine calls the Tyros2 the "gold standard" for this type of keyboard. A keyboard lover in Norway set up a Tyros2 fan site, which averages 160 unique visitors a day.

The Tyros2 is an arranger keyboard, a type of high-tech piano that at a push of a button turns into a flute, a violin or hundreds of other instruments - 1,312 sounds, to be exact. Users are home enthusiasts, recording studios and solo artists who don't have a band to back them up.

"It produces very professional-sounding results without you having to go to a studio or learn how to play bass," said Julian Colbeck, "Major Dude" of Keyfax New Media, a Santa Cruz company that operates several music-user sites, including arrangerworkstation.com.

"What Tyros has done is upped the ante in terms of sound to a dramatically new level. There have been others, but they sounded a little hokey but fine at home playing for granny," Colbeck said.

Tyros2 is also packed with technology. There's built-in memory and a computer chip, though Yamaha won't disclose the technical specs. There's room for a laptop-size hard drive, input jacks to transfer MIDI song files and connections for a VGA monitor. There are also two USB ports. If you plug a Wi-Fi USB key into one port, you can wirelessly access Yamaha's Internet store, which sells songs in MIDI format and digital sheet music.

But the sound is what everyone raves about.

"Does it fly? Oh. My. Gawd. Best sax I ever had. Play any line off-the-cuff, and at worst, it sounds like hours were spent editing note transitions. At best, it sounds like a real player," wrote Stephen Fortner, technical editor of Keyboard magazine in his February review. "Brilliant work, Yamaha!"

The original Tyros, introduced in 2002, added "MegaVoices" technology, which was Yamaha's term for the extra sounds that made music from a guitar sound realistic. But Tyros was limited to guitar.

In Tyros2, Yamaha calls the improved sounds "Super Articulation." They add even more details to guitar, string and horn sounds. The computer inside the keyboard analyzes the keys as they play in real time, adding little sound effects to turn the tune into anything from an unplugged concert to a live orchestra performance.

The sounds were recorded in Yamaha's studios worldwide, with musicians specializing in each niche - from James Brown funk to Eurotrance and U.S. hip-hop. Anderson, responsible for getting some of the musicians to create the music, said that each little detail - from the zwoop of the bass guitarist sliding a hand on the frets to the thumping of the strings - was recorded.

"We sampled each note and then used algorithms to make sure the sounds aren't put in too often," Anderson said. "I think they did a marvelous job. It really sounds like a guitar."

Even keyboard lovers who don't own one have gushed about the new machine.

Kenneth Gundersen, who lives in Norway, started the Tyros2.net fan site just for fun. Gundersen owns a TechnicsKN7000 but after seeing a demo of the keyboard and listening to recordings fans shared on his site, he hopes to get a Tyros2.

"I must admit that, for me, the Tyros2 is a head in front of my KN7000 keyboard. The Tyros2 have very good sounds, styles (rhythms), etc.," Gundersen said in an e-mail interview. "When I bought the KN7000 I thought that now sounds, etc. can't be better, but the Tyros2 have proved that there is always room for more improvements."

Even with the amazing sound, some musicians in the U.S. look down on arranger keyboards because of the stigma that these are something found in granny's house, said Colbeck, with Keyfax New Media.

"Sound for sound, people who hear the Tyros say, 'My God, what's that?' And when they see it, they say, 'Oh great. Do you have a synthesizer?' They feel a little embarrassed playing it with all the sounds on it."




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