Yamaha PSR-330

The Ease of Use is great. This thing is so easy to use. I would rate it a 10
because Everything is so easily accesible. The sounds are pretty good, but are excellent
for its price range.I have many keyboards like korg trinity/triton, Roland XP-80 etc.
but none of them are as easy to use as the YAMAHA Psr-330. It's just great.

The polyphony is excellent for its price range. It has 32 notes of polyphony.
The effects are good and again are easy to use. This keyboard has full midi
capibilities with touch sensitive,velocity,after touch etc.
It also has an onboard sequencer wich is great. You cant do the whole deal
on this sequencer,but`its good for practice sequences. Again the sequencer is very ease to use.

The instruments really are realastic, and especially for its price range.
The piano is good, the acoustic guitar is great,and the drums are also pretty good.
It has great sounds for its price range. It works well for all types of music. The on-board effects are also excellent.
It also reacts to your playing, which is nice.

Yes I could probably depend on it. I dont know if I would use it on a gig
since it is not totally professional, But it is great for practicing
and writing/composing.

I havent ever contacted the customer service but I am sure that they are nice.

The PSR-330 comes with a big LCD screen and plenty of buttons, so accessing features is generally straightforward. Some buttons serve multiple functions (depending on what mode you're in) that aren't immediately obvious. The manual is average, but the machine isn't very complex, so you could probably get by without it.

Max polyphony may be an issue if you're using this keyboard to create complete productions. You get some very simple reverbs and delays. Keyboard action is decent, but no aftertouch kind of sucks. The expansion slot isn't particularly useful; the PSR-340 comes with a floppy drive, which might be worth the extra money you'd have to pay. Other unfortunate omissions include pitch and mod wheels, as well as a line out. The sequencer is pretty simple; I use Cakewalk Pro Audio for any recording I do with this thing. It's got two 6W speakers (okay for personal use) and can run on batteries, which makes it pretty easy to set up and play anywhere.

Standard GM sounds. Not bad for an instrument in its price range; it's pretty vanilla-sounding, but it'll do the job for getting ideas into the computer and maybe for live work (though you may want to use some external effects in the case of the latter, because the internal ones don't quite cut it). The rhythm presets are okayish for practicing and maybe sampling and chopping up, but tend to be on the cheesy side.

It's pretty heavy and is made of thick plastic. I've carted it around quite a lot over the past two years and have never had any problems.

I've had this keyboard since soon after it came out, and I've never had any reason to deal with Yamaha. I've heard they provide good support, but their product has rendered support unnecessary. <g>

This is an entry-level keyboard, but as far as they go, it's served me well. It worked okay for me for practicing my playing and controlling other gear, and I've even done a few gigs with it, but it's not going to be the centerpiece of anyone's studio. Still, they're fairly cheap these days, and since I can always use it to control other MIDI devices, it'll never be completely obsolete to me. A pitch wheel, a line out, and a MIDI Thru would be nice, but those were probably no included for cost reasons. If it were lost or stolen, I'd probably look to upgrade to something a little more professional sounding, but a keyboard of this type might make for a good introduction to MIDI, home practice unit, or backup axe.

Simply put, this is a very good board at a very good price. The presets are awesome for a one-method only synth, but pale slightly compared to Yamamha's higher-up boards. Acoustic instruments sound suprisingly real, with great guitars and organs. The synth presets are very weak, even though some sound pretty cool.
Editing patches is easy, bu it took me a while to get proficient enough to scroll through all the submenus. No patch editor as such, but very effiecent one by one parameter editing. The manual was tradtionally good, but the midi coverage was slightly vague. You have got to know about keyboards to use this one effieciently, although it is easy to just start playing it.

It sports 31-voice polyphony, which rivals quite a few higher-end synths, but it loses a lot of it with the accompianiment. Keyboard action is, well, spring-loaded at best with oversensitive touch-sensitivity. however, the board reacts(aftertouch) well, and it takes a lot to get your hands tired.

Built in effects live in two places: harmony and reverb. the reverb is excellent, but the 9 different choices sound pretty much the same, except for the delay effect. THe harmony is great for playing programs like violin and piano,and it give you instant triads on every note you play, making people think you are playing multipule notes! The harmony menu has quite a few options, some of which are good, others not so good. The psr330 can accept cards(music cartridge) which can expand the style pile a little. i haven't ordered any yet because the keyboard has a wide range of styles to choose from. midi is limited to in and out, but it can play any midi sequence with 16 tracks.
a very easy to use, easy to edit sequencer. i love sequencing my songs to record them. just one grip here. not enough memory. it can handle 4 tracks plus accompaniment, but not longer than 2 minutes or so. It lets you save 2 preset songs on RAM, but if you make a long song on one, then you won't have much space left for 2.

As i said before, the keyboard has awesome acoustics for a keyboard. The organs are my favorite. Very expressive, but lacking touch-sensititvity that's worth anything hurts. no pitch or modulation wheel. one nice feature is an easy to use transpose, that lets you play on a different key instantly, and you just keep playing on the original key. velocity sens is very good, and handels my fast chord arpeggios well. No insert effects, but the are real-time insertable preset phrases that help out here and there. my favorite is applause!
this keyboard reacts big time with velocity sens. it just knows when you want to play soft and slow or loud and hard. otherwise, it's pretty static.

very reliable. it has performed flawlessly at the gigs i've played.
right now, it's one of 2 keyboards i play and i'm always taking it to gigs by itself.

never needed it, but heard from a fellow PSR series player that yamaha was excellent to him, which i'm sure they are.

if it were lost or stolen, i would make a huge effort to retrive it, but i wouldn't buy another. i would move up to a higher-end PSR model.I've been playing since i was 5, and now i'm 15. I play with it in a band with my roland kc100 amp, and casio ctk-150 board. i love all of it except the pad-synth presets. I've compared it to $3000 synths, and it blowes them away. the korg triton pro sucks compared to the pianos and guitars on my lowly psr330. I will hold on to it for a while i'm sure. It helped write 18 songs, and never gets in the way. I only wish it had more RAM! for the sequencer.
If anyone reads this, please help me out. i need a nice synth with a sequenser and disk drive for under $1,400! Please help me out.

This synth is very easy to use, there's a big LCD display with buttons on the side and everything. The sounds are decent, but not spectacular, and there's no way to edit patches.

The polyphony is only 32, but it is decent. It also has a 5 track built-in sequencer, but it sucks. It comes with 8 different types of reverb (sounds good) and some chorus effects. It also accepts those Yamaha expansion cards that come with extra songs and rhythm styles. The multi-pads are a joke. While you can choose from 26 different styles, it rarely has what you need. You can also save presets in four different slots, which is a nice feature to have. No pitch-bend wheel, which pisses me off.

The instruments are decent, but most of them aren't very realistic, especially the guitars. The synth is probably best for techno.

It hasn't broken down yet, very dependable, I'd gig without a backup.

Never had to deal with them.

I've been playing on and off and I can't say I hate it. If it were stolen, I'd go beat the shit out of the fucker who did it, not because I love my synth to death, but because it cost a lot of money. Otherwise, I wish it had a pitch-bend wheel.