Yamaha P200

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I just wanted to agree with Troy on this aspect of this entire "line" of yamaha keyboards (the "P" series). I am a "pro" player for a major label country artist, and I use a Yamaha "P" keyboard for all my piano sounds (because I LOVE it!) : ) BUT...i have had the same exact "sticking notes" problem Troy mentioned. In fact, I even noticed the very same "slight-shifting-to-the-left" of the notes that stick. These note were even "D"s, just like he mentioned. HMMmmm i wonder whats going on there?? So, yea, that IS a concern, especially when youre out on the road and keys start sticking on you in a gig! VERY frustrating. Other than that, the P-series is still, far and beyond, my FAVORITE dig piano sound. PLEASE Yamaha, fix this!! WhatEVER causes it.

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I have had my yamaha p-200 for two years now and I have had no problems with the keys sticking at all. When I am playing I really rock-n-roll the piano. I play strickly blues and heavy boogie woogie. What I mean is this piano (P-200) is really great for piano pounding action. If thats what your into. I really am impressed with this product. I hope that anyone who has this problem will remember to keep drinks away from it.

UPDATE - P200 Service Issues

As mentioned in my review a couple of posts down. I had many keys sticking. The keys actually shift to the left slightly and when that happens, there is no quick fix, the key has to be replaced.

After dealing with some service centers here in Texas, I finally contacted Jason Lee of Yamaha. I by then, was 2 months out of warranty. Jason Lee made sure that I found a service center that would accept my board, then went the extra mile and had my entire keybed replaced.

This is absolutley amazing. I cannot express how impressed I am with Yamaha and its people. They had a new keybed to my tech in less than a week. and the entire unit felt brand new.

The p-200 is a great board, sounds incredible, and I dont believe there is a better digital piano anywhere. And Yamaha is the best.

Most of the presets sound great. Im only interested in 'real' keyboard instruments like piano, Rhodes, and Hammond. The affordable competition all seemed to have only pipe organs! This meets all my requirements for playing in a big r&b band, and solo. It impresses everyone. I always use one of the program banks (the 12 preset voice buttons can be reprogrammed to any existing voice or combination of 2 voices in a pair of banks A or B) I make much use of piano with hammond as lower second voice. I must add I'm not impressed with the string sounds though, my old cheap casio job has better. I don't use them so it's no big deal to me.

Can't remember the polyphony but I have only 8 fingers and 2 thumbs. A good trick with the piano hammond combination is to play with the sustain pedal down. The Piano fades quickly (per real piano) but the organ sound sustains indefinately until the pedal is lifted. By lifting and depressing the pedal at the end of each chord change, they sound like they are being played by two different musicians!! The piano runs are supported by the organ chords, and the large polyphony prevents the organ chord expiring (if you see what I mean). This really makes for a big sound. I use the swell pedal to control either the single voice, or in combination, the level of the second voice.

The instrument plays beautifully as a piano, from a caress to a crash. Which suits me as I play from stax soul ballads to JL Lewis rock'n'roll. I cannot fault it.

Not perfect I'm afraid. I've had mine for 3 1/2 years and still love it BUT: 1. I have had a low F key consistantly jumping out of it's pivot after 2 years (they are held in by the return springs)for no obvious reason. I opened the keyboard and fixed it myself by adding a retainer I made. This would be a fairly catastrophic problem for some people. 2. I have also had ongoing problems with the voices jumping to one another. This is down to agression in rock playing, and the voice lock does alleviate it, but not eliminate it! (it happens about once each gig, instantly corrected, and lived with). I first had it fixed by the dealer after 6 months, but it reemerged a year later. As an aside, I had the same problem with a domestic Clavinola CLP650 (15 years old). Could this be PCBs bouncing?

I dealt with the dealer who sold me the keyboard on the voice jumping problem. He did his best to convince me my fingers were hitting the voice buttons while playing boogie. Even to the point of claiming another customer did the same thing! This sounded suspiciously like the problem is inherent in the keyboard and they had, had returns before. I have not found any reference to the problem elsewhere. Anyone?

I've been playing 40 years, I also play taylor acoustics, minor electric guitars, sing, and am learning tenor sax.
I love the basic instrument which could not be better my playing.
The weight is a pain (try carrying it past mics, monitors etc)
I chose it for the sounds and price (best in UK)
Nothing is perfect, I can be a bit heavy handed in my playing when carried away, but pianos are PERCUSSION instruments and should not break with finger pressure. Therfore the instrument is not fully robust. But moans aside, I would happily replace it with a used model the same but check for the highlighted faults.

Yeah, it is easy as long as you have big cahon-ees to lug it around.

I can't even spell polyphony let alone pronounce it. Features are piano, piano and piano if you know what I mean.

Piano, piano, piano...did I mention the great piano sounds? Absolutely tops

I am writing again because I still have mine after years of good service and it is still just fine. Troy sounds like he has some serious problems. I have owned about a dozen different boards but never had the keys stick on one. Troy, stop spilling your margaritas on your keyboards, dude!

You gotta go to the school of whining if you want to get satisfied, Troy. Call them up every day. Make their life miserable until they take care of you. Tell them you are unstable and own lots of high explosives, whatever it takes. Troy, have you tried opening it up and seeing if you can clean the mechanical aspects of your board? Sounds like you should do that and then find out why you own boards with sticky keys. My first guess is you need to get a drink stand and get your suds away from the top of your boards so when you "slosh" you don't douche your keys.

Of course I would get another one....otherwise I will have nothing else to put my back out. I mean, I could push my mini-van around with the engine off and the parking brake on but there is nothin' finer than to hear a disk pop when you lift this beast onto the keyboards stand. Troy, take the garden hose to your boards and rinse off the Kamakazees. Good luck! Buy this board people, it is the best piano action and sound out there.

I have been touring with Yamaha Pianos now for 9 years. I originally owned a P-100. A great board with great sounds. That board lasted 3-4 nights a week for 7 years. It has since been retired and now resides in my office here. The P-200 I have owned for a little over a year. I fell in love with my P200 and love it. It's a great board when piano, and only piano, is what is important. but, please see reliability for some issues.

Great sounds, I have used most of the patches on the board, but in the current genre I play in, The Piano is all I really use. Along with a Korg CX-3 for Organ stuff.

Great.

The P-100, like i mentioned above lasted a long time. It took a faulty 220 power hit and with a minor fix was up and running again. The Keys did not start sticking until about 6 years after I had the board. Thats pretty good.

The P-200 is a different animal all together. Not even a year after getting this board, keys started to stick. First the D's then E's and so on. Now approx 15 keys are known to stick, and the numbers climbing. I live in Texas, and for a Touring Musician, it nearly impossible to get service on this board. The have a minimum of 3 weeks before I can get the board looked at. Which means I have to use my p100 for live gigs, which in case you missed it, has keys that are sticking also. Yamaha is simply not interested in helping get my board fixed. I requested that (2) different service centers simply order me a new Key Bed, so I could have the entire keyboard replaced. But, Yamaha doesn't want to do it that way.

I really love my P-200. Its a great piano, but problems like these are bound to come up if you use your Piano often. Please consider this as a warning. It sounds good, but if in less than a year, you are going to have a major malfunction, maybe there are other boards out there that may last a little longer, and not cause problems for people who use them to make a living.

Pathetic. Your service center may be friendly, but take in a major repair and see how long it takes.

Great Piano with some major, major flaws. The Weighted Keys are a serious problem on this board. The P-100 had a much heartier action.
The P-200 is simply not worth the trouble you will have down the road.

This piano is extremely easy to use, very straightforward. I love the grand piano in this keyboard! I haven't tried to edit the presets because they sound really good to me.

I believe the polyphony is 64 and I love the keyboard action! One of the best I have ever felt! When you play this keyboard you can feel the vibrations from the speakers. The built-in effects I belive have a few reverbs to choose from and I believe chorus. For a digital piano I believe it has enough sounds, grand pianos, ep's, organs, basses, etc.

This area is very subjective but the piano sound is great but it sounds like one layer was only used so there is definitely no velocity switching-which is different from velocity sensitive which this keyboard is...so your stuck with a piano that no matter how hard you play it you hear different volumes of the piano being struck with the same force sound. The onboard effects are good, and it is a piano that is a joy to play.

I never bought just have spent over an hour playing it...Yamaha products seem to be reliable though.

This piano is great. It definitely has one of the best piano sounds I have heard. I wish there was a way to combine the quality of brightness and presence of this sound with the 4 way velocity switching on the Roland Concert Piano Expansion card that is realistic but very mellow and dark( for XV's, Roland RD-700 and the Fantom)-and you would hear one great, dynamic, "cut-through the mix" perfect piano!!! But for now the Yamaha Motif Power Piano grand will more than do.

The P200 was my first "serious" keyboard, and I had no trouble learning to use it, with only a little help from the well-organized manual.

It would be nice to have more than 64 voices... I find myself running out on occasion. The features are fairly limited.

The piano sounds (especially the two stereo pianos) are excellent, full, realistic. I am a pianist, and pretty much have a solid idea of what a piano is supposed to sound like... and this is very close. The mid-range is excellent, though sometimes the extreme high end sounds a little bit unrealistic. Yamaha did a fair job of replicating the effects of playing very high notes (where the surrounding strings give an ugly sound b/c they are not dampened), but the sustain is a little bit wrong (Mid-range sustain, however, is excellent).

The keyboard is the most piano-like I've played on, though I can still tell a slight difference. One commenter mentioned turning the volume up and feeling the sound through the keys - this is absolutely true. In performance situations, I like to play this with both an amp for monitoring purposes AND the on-board speakers, to give the physical reverberation in the keys.

One complaint is that it is simply not possible to use this thing on an X-style stand - it weighs too much, and "rocks" gently back and forth... must get a very solid Z stand or some other sort of thing.

As a piano, this is excellent.

Never had any problems.

I just bought a used p-200, upgraded myself from the P80 as I thought it really was a bad instrument.
You can use the P200 as a basic piano, but there are a lot of things to learn about this instrument for those who want! Definitely more complex than the P80

I must say that that the action on this unit is better than on the P80. The speakers make it really realistic cause when you turn the volume up a bit the keys are "shaking". It feels so good!

The best sound that is on the market.
I promise you.
I have played semi-professional for 8 years.
This is what I've been looking for!!!

It might be a bit heavy, but that is some kind of way what makes it so wonderful!
I love Yamaha!!

Never have any problem with Yamaha.

Buy this is you want the best digitalpiano ever built.
All the Pro's use it.
And now when Yamaha comes up with a new model, you can get it for a very nice used!!

Easy to use. The presets are all high quality but there's only 12 or 13 of them. The reason to get it is for the pianos. Getting around this thing is easy and you really don't need to refer to the manual at all unless you want to do some advanced stuff. The manual is well written I guess.

Polyphony is 64. The piano 1 and piano 2 presets can either be stereo 32 part, or mono 64 part. The rest are 64. The effects are easy to use and there are dedicated buttons for on/off. I basically just use the room reverb effect. It also has a couple of chorus type effects. This unit cannot be expanded with cards or anything. I guess I will give it a 5 for features because it doesn't have much, but like I said, the reason to get it is because of the piano sound and feel.

It's got dedicated buttons for bass, mid and treble and you can get inside the thing and adjust these for each patch. You can combine two voices and then adjust the volume of each internally as well.

You can split the keyboard anywhere you want, it's got two mod wheels, an internal pitch setting, blah blah, woof woof just buy it for the pianos.

The pianos here are the best I've ever played. Perhaps there is something better out there but I have not come across it. If you primarily want to play piano then check this board out. The other sounds are well done, such as the vibes and the accoustic bass. The strings are the sythetic type. The 0rgans seem really good and offer alot of editing but I haven't messed with them much. The Rhodes sounds are o.k. I guess, but they don't quite sound authentic.

None of it matters really, although I play the Rhodes alot and sometimes combine the vibes and accoustic bass, the reason to get this thing is the piano sounds.

This thing would survive just about anything you could throw on it. I got mine used with a flight case. This thing has been around a long time and I don't forsee much that could go wrong with it.

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I would buy this thing again. It's one of the top purchases I have ever made in my life. Really, the only downside is the weight. I keep mine in the same place and have only moved once since I've owned it. It's a two man job even though my flight case has wheels.

I've read reviews of the P-150 and P-80 claiming that the piano sounds in those units rival this one, but I don't agree. I really wanted to buy the P-80 instead of this. It would have been cheaper but to my ears the pianos were not of the quality of this unit. I think the reason is that the AWM generator is in this unit, whereas the P-80 and alot of the newer Yamaha units have the AWM-2.

I really didn't need the built in speakers but I'm glad to have them as it's one less thing to turn on. I will probably get a sound module with some freaky sounds in it one day to augment the stock sounds here and it will be nice just to come out of that back into these speakers.

Anyway, if you are looking for a great playing and great sounding PIANO from Yamaha, then try this thing out. That's the reason to buy it. The other features are nice and some of the other sounds are nice to have, but it's the piano sounds and piano feel that makes this thing earn it's keep.