As we start a new year, I thought it would be useful to look back on the year we just completed to help me decide directions for 2019. So, here is a bit of a summary for 2018.
PSR Tutorial ForumWe currently have about 4,800 members. 2,400 joined in 2018 and 2,600 joined in 2017. We average about 6-7 new member every day. The total is kept in check by deleting members who are absent over a two-year period.
There were 5,900 topics (16/day) in 2018, up 11% from the 5,300 in 2017 and 4,200 in 2016 and 2015.
There were 44,000 posts last year. That averages to about 120/day. This is down from 52,000 posts in 2017, which was a record high. The posts do indicate where the member interest is. I looked at each of the boards to see where the majority of posts were being made. The table below shows the results of this survey.
Posts | Board |
11,300 | Genos-General |
3,900 | All other Genos boards |
3,700 | PSR-S970 and PSR-S975 |
3,400 | Sheet Music, Fake Books |
2,100 | Tyros5 |
2,100 | Styles/OTS |
2,100 | Songs Played by Forum Members |
1.200 | Misc Announcements |
1,100 | PSR-E Series |
1,000 | Yamaha Keyboards |
Clearly the current keyboards get the majority of activity. The Genos was not only new, but it was different from earlier models and so it generated lots of discussion. Keyboards that are several years old are no longer of much interest. Besides the keyboards, members cared about styles, sheet music, and sharing their songs. For more info on Forum Statistics, click on Home and then scroll to the bottom of your screen and check out the Forum Stats link.
PSR Tutorial Web SiteSharing songs was also the focus of the main PSR Tutorial site. 21 PSR Performers added 514 songs in 2018, 30 hours of music. We introduced 5 new Performers in 2018: Andrey Gusev (Tyros5-76) in May, Yuriy Baygush (PSR-E363), Ryszard Bieszdad (Tyros4), and Norman Fernandez (S770) in June, and Toine DeJong (Tyros2) in December. 9 contributors joined 13 performers to give us 96 songs in the 2018 Christmas Jukebox. At this moment there are 3,307 MP3 songs available online. 760 of these are in the Archived Performers section where I have kept a sample of 20 or so songs from earlier PSR Performers, some of which are no longer with us. There are over 3,400 songs that are retired, that is, no longer available online. Most of these songs, however, are available in the Songs 2013 and Songs 2017 collection, which was updated in January of 2018.
The Genos also dominated the styles generated last year. We had Genos conversions released by Henni and by Peter Mahl. Onacimus released a Unique T5 styles collection and a Tyros5 Special Styles collection. He has also been working on doing a complete conversion of all Genos styles for the S970, the Tyros4, and the Tyros5. That work is still in progress. Henni also provided a collection of Korg styles converted for the Tyros5. I released the Styles #12 collection in April of 2018.
In May a Genos page was added under Yamaha > Styles and in April a PSR-S975 page was added. Also in April, I added a pSR-S970 Tutorial videos and PSR-S975 demo videos.
Brian Cowell added two articles: "The MVC10 Controller and the S970" and "Using the MFC10 Midi Controller with the PSR-S970." In October, Onacimus' article on "Replacing Unknown OTS Voices" helped explain how to determine what the unknown voices were. I also added a QuickStep article on how to convert a midi file to a wav file on the S970.
Finally, Murray Best released Version 5.11 of his Registration Manager in March and Etienne Voibragt released updated versions of MixMaster in March, May, and August.
At the start of 2019, I am now in the process of moving my support of this site from my aging iMac to a new Windows 10 PC. I have also acquired a new version of Dreamweaver and, hopefully, will be able to update the site to handle pads and smartphones as well as computers. Updating the content is another issue. I have a Tyros5-76, but not a Genos or a S970 (or S975). The lack of interest in older keyboards may indicate a lack of interest in most of our lesson material. Also, we have all those MP3s online showing up not only on the PSR Performer page, but also in the alphabetical index. Does anyone really care about all those songs? Should I get rid of the alphabetical indexes? But, Lunarpages renewal is due in the next week and I will be paying for another year of the PSR Tutorial. It will be interesting to see what that year brings.