YAMAHA PSR 3000

YAMAHA's venture PSR 3000 is the predecessor of MOTIF series. Yamaha PSR 3000 comes with half the price of Yamaha MOTIF with most of the features of Yamaha MOTIF. It has the sound engine of MOTIF with Megavoices, and also bit of looks of MOTIF. Yamaha PSR 3000 looks busy with lot of buttons in the control board. It looks like a complicated system, but once right hands are put on it, it will be very easy to use. It works as a good system for the gigs (smaller like entertaining relatives or friends to big concerts with your band) and also as an arranger workstation where you can produce professional quality music.

Here are the few main features of Yamaha PSR 3000

• Polyphony – 128 notes
• Preset Rhythms – More than 240 ranging all styles
• Keyboard – 5 Octaves
• Touch Sensitivity – Yes
• Pitch Bend Control – Yes
• Modulation Wheel – Yes
• Internal Memory – 16 MB
• Smart Media Card – Yes
• Floppy or CD – No (Can attach)
• Number of Tracks – 16
• DSP Effects –Yes (Editable)
• Mega voices – Yes

MegaVoices

YAMAHA PSR 3000 Inherits the Mega Voices from MOTIF. This is one of the main advantages of YAMAHA PSR 3000. YAMAHA describes Mega Voices like this. Most digital keyboards create their sound from recording or sampling instruments and when you press the keys, you're playing back the sample. Previous to Mega Voice Technology, in traditional sampling, an instrument's pitch was recorded at different increments (C, C#, D, D# etc.) and that was about it. Unfortunately, that leaves out a lot of the subtle nuances that make an instrument sound unique. For example, on a guitar, traditional sampling would miss the string and pick noise. Yamaha Mega Voice technology provides open and mute string sounds, dead notes, hammering effects, slide effects, harmonics and a wide range of strum and body noises – putting back the missing elements that take a sampled guitar from sounding like a guitar played on a keyboard to a Mega Voice sampled guitar that sounds like, dare we say, a guitar!

Here are few of the demos of Megavoices. The demo has two parts. First it starts with normal sound and then plays the same in Megavoice to give the difference.

Along with these MegaVoices there are many GM and XG sounds too. This makes huge collections of sounds to play around(around 830). The fun part of playing around comes when we apply effects to these sounds. PSR 3000 comes with huge sets of sounds and allow editing them to suite our taste and music. There are 5 types of Hall Effects (Reverb), Room Effects, different kinds of Rotary Speaker effects, Flanger, Distortion, Auto Pan, Wah Effect, etc. Reverb can be made wet or dry to suite our music, flanger and wah rates can be controlled, rotary speaker frequency can be controlled, etc. Different kinds of sounds can be designed by applying more than one of these effects with different parameters.The sound creator helps a lot in designing your own sound. It allows to set Portamento Time, Touch Sense, DSP effects, Brightness, Decay, etc and save the sound as the user created sound.

Styles

YAMAHA PSR 3000 comes with more than 100 styles ranging most of the genres like

Each style has 3 intros and 3 endings. Each style has 4 variations ranging from soft to hard and 4 fillers. A style will have at least 5 tracks. 2 for percussion, 1 for base, 1 chord, and one for pad. User can create his or her own rhythms as well, but cannot apply effects to them. There are facilities such that the system plays the rhythm when u starts playing your first note and also only when your hands are on the keys.

Registration Banks
Registration Banks are place where we can save an edited voice. We can also specify which rhythm it has to fetch when a voice is selected. They are very helpful in organizing voices with its settings. It helps a lot in fetching the required sound out of the huge collection of preset sounds during live performances. There are more than 30 registration banks and each back can register 8 voices.

Multipads
Even the basic of the Yamaha’s keyboards are having styles and Multipads. What makes them special in PSR 3000 is the quality of the sounds matching the current trend and obviously more quantity. There are almost 100 or more Multipads. Multipads assists with live performances with the DJ sounds like Groove fills, Disk Scratch, etc. They also provide us with many loops of Combos, Jungle percussions, Latin rhythm loops, guitar loops, piano and accordion arpeggios, etc. Multipads are very helpful for filling up your music with good punches or at least if some part of your music is weak. Just like styles you can create your own Multipads too.

YAMAHA PSR 3000 as an Arranger Workstation

YAMAHA PSR 3000 can be very well used to produce professional quality music. There is a 16 track sequencer. Recording a song can be as simple as switching the keyboard ON. Select your rhythm and voice, press the record button and start recording your song. Stop when you are done and press play button to hear it. If you are happy then save the song else go for one more try.

The song creator provides much functionality for the recorded tracks. It has

• Punch in and Punch out recording –You are not happy with some of the bars of the recorded tracks? Then go to that part of the track and record over it instead of recording the entire track. It’s very easy in YAMAHA PSR 3000 as the song navigation is also very easy compared to PSR 640. In this method, only the data between the Punch In point and the Punch Out point is overwritten with the newly recorded data. You can specify the Punch In and Punch Out points as measure numbers beforehand for automatic operation, or manually execute the Punch In/Out recording by using a Foot Pedal or simply by playing the keyboard.
  
• Quantize –This puts the notes in the proper place if they are out of the rhythm while recording. This is required for all no matter novice or professional. It can quantize up to 32^nd note. You can specify the quantize level too. 100% means it will place it 100% accurate make it sound like computer generated. 75 to 80% will place the notes like a good human being musician. It depends on how well its played. If very well played then no need of quantize at all. Usually one ends up with at least a phrase which needs to be Quantized. Unfortunately it's not possible to quantize only certain section of the track.
  
• Step Recording – Here you can edit each note of the track. You can place a note where ever you want in the rhythm, increase the length or volume of the note, change the voice of the note, apply effects to that note or change the note itself. That is if you played C# instead of C, then you can correct it to C here or if you played a note very smoothly instead of hard you can change the volume of the note here. This one is very important for arranger to bring music to perfection (technically).

Vocal Harmony
You want to add vocals to your songs? And you can’t afford a studio and an engineer to work on it? No problem. Take a good quality microphone and take your PSR 3000 to a quite place, that’s it. Yes YAMAHA PSR 3000 processes your vocals too. You can record the accompaniment in PSR 3000 and use the same PSR 3000 for your vocal processing too for your gigs. You can add effects like reverb, room, flanger, pan, rotary, etc to your vocals too. Ya, that sounds amazing. And more amazing is PSR 3000 comes with vocoder. You can do Cher’s Do you Beliehieve in love kind of effects using PSR 3000. You don’t have any one to harmonize with you for your gig? Again YAMAHA PSR 3000 comes in rescue. It has over 100 kinds of vocal harmonizers like countrymen, Falsett Trio, JazzSisters, etc. Keep this away from kids. They will get addicted to it.

Listen to some of the samples of Vocal Harmonizers Demo

Storage Space and Removable Drives and Networking
Goodbye to the floppy disks and floppy drives. They were more nu sense and prone to the loss of data. YAMAHA PSR 3000 comes with 16MB of internal storage memory. It has a Smart Card Slot. Smart cards come with varied range from 128 MB to 1GB or more. It also has 2 USB slot at the back. One 'USB to host' for recording and playing back midi files. Another one is 'USB to device'. This can be used to connect to other additional peripherals like floppy drive or Hard Drive, etc. It can’t be better than this, right? But no, it is better than this. YAMAHA PSR 3000 can be connected to internet. It also has NF embedded browser too. Using internet connection you can connect to Yamaha’s special website and get updates, tips and download lots of music and samples. Obviously you have to pay for them. The user interface is very easy and handy to browse internet and it is designed for the downloads and info gathering. It’s obviously not designed for sending emails.

There are many more features in YAMAHA PSR 3000 like

Music Finder - If you want to play in a certain genre of music but don’t know which Style and Voice settings would be appropriate, the convenient Music Finder function can help you out. Simply select the desired music genre from among the Music Finder “Records,” and the PSR-3000 automatically makes all appropriate panel settings to let you play in that music style.

Notation Display – You can view the notation and lyrics (if included in the midi file) of the midi songs on the display screen for each track. It shows in the staff notation format.

Split Levels – You can set the split level on your keys to have a separate sound for your left hand and right hand. You can have an acoustic bass on your left hand and Tenor sax for your right hand. Split it up to C1 OR C#1 or A1 of any one and play both Sax and Bass by your self and sound like a Jazz duo.

Demos – YAMAHA PSR 3000 comes with some amazing built in demos. There are demonstrations for how Megavoices differ from others and how its sounds match all the genres of music. The demos are played along with the display. All the demos are created using the sounds and functionalities present in PSR 3000.

Listen to the main demo of PSR 3000 here

YAMAHA PSR 3000 is made to please everybody. It’s good for those who are beginning to learn with auto accompaniments with single fingered chords and performance assistance which will not allow you to play wrong notes. I don’t know I never used that but this is what andysmusiconline.com has to say about it.

Performance Assistance Technology - Guarantees that you can't play a wrong note. Here's how it works. Select an XF compatible song, press the Performance Assistant button and every note you play will fit the music. If you move up the keyboard, the pitch goes up. If you move down, the pitch goes down. Play a perfect arpeggio, or play chords in time with the music, or really go for it and play a solo. As long as performance assistant is "on", you're "on".

PSR 3000 is good for the gigs (for family or with band) and also to professionally create and record a song. Thumbs up for YAMAHA PSR 3000 for its beautiful functionalities and cheaper price. Yamaha PSR 3000 is good go for any body upgrading from lower end of Yamaha series or anybody who cannot afford MOTIF and cannot afford to miss MOTIF series. If you already have PSR 3000 then happy music making else happy store hitting for demos. ATB..

Check out some of the songs composed by me in PSR 3000

Few Photos of PSR 3000

Display Screens

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