Time does seem to be flying past these days. Now that it is July, I thought it might be useful to produce a 1st half 2010 Report for those who do not regularly visit the PSR Tutorial. Regular visitors can always check out the "Recent Additions" box on the home page for the last 10 additions to the site. In addition, the What's New page lists all the daily changes not only for the current year, but all past years as well. But, if you have not visited the site in some time, it can be difficult to tell what you might have missed. This 1st half summary will give you a quick peek at all that we have added to the site in the past six months. I'll review the new additions for each of the major sections on the site.

 

Lessons

The long-promised Lessons updated was finally launched in earnest. Five major sections were added under Lessons, each of which contain many lesson pages. Here's a summary of the 90+ lesson pages that have been added this year:

Start Here

Geared to all Yamaha PSR and Tyros owners, these lessons are all new and designed to help owners understand the basic components in their arranger keyboards. There are 13 lessons in this section:

Demos

They say "a picture is worth 1,000 words." Well, in this section we tap into the multimedia features of the web and provide you with a number of video demonstrations of the various Yamaha keyboards as well as some tutorials. Our site is often visited by people thinking about getting a Yamaha, or upgrading from their current Yamaha, and this section is designed to provide good examples of what these keyboards can do. There are 13 web pages provided in this section:

Playing

There are some features in the Yamaha arranger keyboard that are outstanding, but also provide areas where new users are often confused. In this section, we tackle these areas where questions frequently come up and provide in depth, step by step explanations in 34 lessons. There are four major areas covered, each containing a number of lesson pages. I authored the lessons in the first two areas, but had a lot of help in the next two:

Tuning

Eventually, most players will want to go beyond the preset styles and voices and "tune" settings to their specific preferences. This section, with 23 lessons, is designed to help you get started using these features of your keyboard. There are three major subsections. Again, I had considerable help from guest authors.

Quick Steps

Quick Steps is one of the sections that was in the original set of lessons. To date, we have updated 8 of these lessons. The remainder will be completed in the next month or so and that will complete the update of all the lessons. At which point, we can start adding entirely NEW lessons! Here are the quick steps completed in the first half of 2010:

Songs

The previous PSR Performers section of the site has been revised and now labeled "Songs". The previous PSR Performer pages, which have been updated significantly are in the new Songs section. Here are some of the highlights introduced this past year in the Songs section:

  • A complete alphabetical index of all 5,100 PSR Performer MIDI songs is now available. All of the midi songs are available online. The song links allow you to audition and/or download ay of the songs. As usual, however, these midi files sound best when played on your keyboard.
  • A complete index of the nearly 800 PSR Performer MP3 songs (excluding Christmas songs) is available in the MP3 section. All of the songs are links and any can be played online and downloaded if desired.
  • A new Forum09 section was added to the site. This includes 20 separate web pages for the more prolific forum performers. Each page includes a jukebox with that forum members MP3 songs from 2009 as well as links to the message threads where the song was introduced. A 21st page, "Other" adds songs from another 16 forum members. All told, there are 360 MP3 files available in this section. Forum postings of PSR Performer songs, which were originally in this section have been moved to their regular PSR Performer pages.
  • A Christmas section under songs has the Christmas Jukebox from 2009, as well as the Jukeboxes from 2008 and 2007. These include holiday songs in MP3 format uploaded by forum members each holiday season. There is also an alphabetical index of all the available Christmas songs.
  • PSR Performers continued to add midi songs. We introduced two new performers: John Phillips, who sent in 6 volumes, and Torben Goldin with his first volume. All told 240 midi songs were added in the first half of 2010 from Alex Green (60 songs), Bob Boyd (30), Dave Bate (10), Del Kay (20), Gary Kilby (10), Gloria Hanson (20), and Spike Hindley (10).
  • Many PSR Performers have been sending in songs in MP3 format rather than midi files. We have more space available on the site and I have also been adding MP3 files from earlier years to the site. All told, we added 171 MP3 files from 20 PSR Performers in the first half of this year. 10 different Yamaha keyboards were represented in the new MP3 files so far this year (PSR730/740, PSR2000/2100/3000, PSR S900/S910, and Tyros1/2/3).

Styles

Everyone loves to get new styles and the PSR Tutorial is a prime source for many new styles. That trend continued in the first half of this year as we added over 2,100 styles to the PSR Tutorial archives. Henni has been a prime contributor with nearly 900 more conversions for the PSR3000. Onacimus has continued his excellent conversion work and added 674 styles to his collection. Eileen Lowry has focused on Tyros3 styles this past year and added 259 T3 styles to her collections page. Finally, Deane Peters ("Hammer"), who recently moved to the PSR-S910, has provided 326 gig disk styles for this new keyboard.

Music

This section was revised and updated last year and there were few changes in the past six months. However, there were a few additions:

Utilities

This section was one of the first updated back in 2009 and so has not seen any changes this past six months. However, Michael Bedesem, who now provides his utilities via the PSR Tutorial, has released several updates in 2010:

CD-ROMS

Three new CD-ROMS have been introduced in the past six months:

  • Forum Attachments 2009 with 6,500 files includes all of the attachments uploaded to the PSR Tutorial forum during 2009 -- 2,872 styles, 146 midi songs, 106 MP3s, 296 pictures, 1,981 voices, and more ($19).
  • Songs of 2009 DVD includes 5,000 midi files and nearly 900 MP3 files, over 4.3 GB of files (equivalent to 6 CD-ROM data discs) with a user-friendly web interface. ($29)
  • PSR Tutorial CD-ROM 2010 is completely updated and revised for 2010. It includes all of the material from the "Music" and the "Utilities" sections of the web site plus all the PSR Performer midi files and 2,100 style files, all with a user-friendly web interface. ($24)

Forum

Behind the scenes, we implemented a more stringent approval process for new members which required pre-approval. Last year we were being hit by a large number of spammers. This new pre-approval has cut this down a great deal and Bill Grosse and Matrix spent many hours scrubbing the registered member list to get rid of "phony" registrations. This has all worked quite well and the forum is operating very nicely with very few unwelcome postings. We also were happy to announce Kurt as a new moderator to the forum.

In the last six months, we have had over 1,200 new forum members and have seen 8,820 posts in 1,263 topics. On the average, we have had 7 new registrations per day and 50 posts per day with an average of 7.7 topics per day. An average of 35 people visit the forum every day. On June 5, we had a 68 people on line, the maximum for the period.

These totals are significantly higher than the numbers from the first half of 2009. New posts are up by 55%, new topics are up by 57%, page views (2.3 million for the first half of this year) are up by 37%. By contrast, new members are down by 51% -- a reflection of the problems we were having with bogus registrations last year.

So, the forum remains a very active, and friendly community. If you haven't been visiting there, you should give it a try!

What's Next?

It's hard to estimate what will be coming in the future, but I can offer what I would like to see. I will complete updating all of the old lesson pages and new lesson pages will be added. PSR Performers will continue to send in midi and mp3 songs and the number of Performers may grow. I'm hoping that we can also update some of the performer biographies. As more owners move up to the S910 (or Tyros3), we should see more styles becoming available for these keyboards. I hope to produce another Styles CD to catch up on the new styles that have shown up in the past couple of years, perhaps a new styles CD specifically for T3 and S910 owners. And, of course, coverage of the new Tyros4 when it is unveiled.

Joe Waters

 


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This page updated on July 7, 2010 .