Gentlemen thank you for your input. I agree that fingered chords sound richer and would open up a whole new world of options. But I come from a chord organ background and have no delusions about my musical ability. One of the reasons I bought an arranger and not a performance synth like the Motif, was for its Single Finger Chord facility.

I will further acknowledge that the Roland/Korg approach to simplified chords (where a minor chord is formed by playing the root plus minor 3rd) does make sense musically, and is closer to "full fingering" which benefits the aspiring student. However I submit that the Yamaha/Technics approach of playing the black key to the LEFT of the root is a better fit for the ergonomics of the human hand. (Not that anything about the "52-tooth monster with a bad case of gingivitis" is especially ergonomic!)

For example, to play C-minor in the Roland system, I presume you would play the root with your pinky, and Eb with your middle finger. But most non-musicians do not have the requisite muscular control of these digits. In the Yamaha system, you would play C with your thumb, and Bb with your pointer. This works well ergonomically because these are the fingers we use most of the time. Also, the longer pointer finger has an easy time reaching the shorter black keys. So although not steeped in music theory, it brings the Yamaha arrangers a little closer to the true one-finger chords of my Chord Organ past. Furthermore, it's what I'm used to.

I spent a good part of today experimenting and came up with some workarounds, which I posted in the forum at psrtutorial.com. One of the easiest is to simply lengthen the attack of the LH voice. The false chord is still recognized, but you don't hear it because it doesn't have a chance reach audible volume before it is replaced with the correct, intended chord.

Still I think Yamaha's hair-trigger approach to SFC recognition is crude and I would like to see it addresed in a future OS update. -Ted

P.S. I would also like to hear from the owners of some older Yamaha instruments, to figure out how and when this problem crept in.


[This message has been edited by TedS (edited 06-25-2006).]