Piano Guidance
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How do I make my Yamaha keyboard sound like a piano?

By pressing just the Portable Grand Button, you will return to playing a grand piano instrument Voice, while simultaneously disengaging any other modes or functions that were active in the keyboard.

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Even with the Yamaha entry-level PSR-E series of keyboards, the ever-growing multitude of features can be somewhat confusing – especially when you are trying to perform, switching from many voices and beats to play solo piano.

Enter the Portable Grand Button.

How does the Portable Grand Button work?

By pressing just the Portable Grand Button, you will return to playing a grand piano instrument Voice, while simultaneously disengaging any other modes or functions that were active in the keyboard.

When can the Portable Grand Button help you?

You’re performing and you’ve started a style with a drum beat playing. You now need to play piano without a back beat. One touch of the Portable Grand Button is all it takes to segue smoothly back. You’re navigating the function menu, trying out new options and are on some screen you don’t recognize – and need to get back to a pure piano sound. The Portable Grand Button restores the sound immediately — no need to remember what you activated – or didn’t activate. You dove into the Yamaha Educational Suite, diligently working on an exercise in MINUS ONE mode. Now you are ready to return to playing the piano. Simply press the Portable Grand Button, and voila! Someone has been trying out all those cool features on your keyboard but simply has no idea how it works. Now you just want to play the piano… and all it takes is one button to restore sanity. All this makes me reflect on a time when civilization was a little less – well, civilized. People had to manually stop a style from playing, manually disable Auto Accompaniment, then manually enter the number 001 on the numeric key pad to get to the piano – all while trying to perform or teach a piece of music coherently. Thanks to the Portable Grand Button, we can all play easier, utilize our time more efficiently and focus on one of the most important matters in life – making more music!

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What is the range of an 88-key piano?

7¼ octaves By the 1890s, today's modern keyboard had become established with 88 keys spanning 7¼ octaves (from 2A to C5; 27.5 Hz to 4,186 Hz*).

The piano that Bartolomeo Cristofori first invented in Italy had only 54 keys. As piano music developed and evolved, the keyboard compass was gradually expanded in response to requests from composers who sought a broader potential for expression. By the 1890s, today's modern keyboard had become established with 88 keys spanning 7¼ octaves (from 2A to C5; 27.5 Hz to 4,186 Hz*). The human ear can hear sounds in the range from approximately 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, but the upper limit of frequencies that the human brain can discriminate is at the very most around 4,000 Hz. Even if the compass were to be expanded by increasing the number of keys on the piano, to the human ear, the extra notes at the bass end would become nothing more than a rumbling noise, and the added treble notes would be heard as an unpleasant dissonant noise with no sense of being in a tonal range, and thus, musically, would be almost meaningless. Boesendorfer is making 97-key pianos with nine additional keys in the bass segment of the keyboard (2C to C5). However, the strings for these nine keys in the lowest bass segment are really only there to provide a richer sound when other keys are played by resonating with them. In reality, the extra keys themselves are almost never played directly. * When A is tuned to 440 Hz. The pitch of the individual keys will vary depending on the tuning method.

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