I will be picking up my keyboard at my teenage friend's father's work - one mile from my house. He charged me $20 to install the HDM, tighten a speaker that was buzzing and to fix the modulation wheel that got dislodged. I'll give him a $5 tip.

Here is a preliminary analysis of the HDM according to my phone conversation. It works!

When you turn on the keyboard, my 128mb flash chip (which is not removeable because it is stuck inside the keyboard) is partitioned into 88 partitions. There is a channel changer device that you can use to scroll from partition 1 to partition 88. I imagine that each partition is the size of a floppy because 128mb divided by 88 is a little over 1.5.

When you access a partition for the first time, the keyboard asks if you want to format the floppy. Now the strange thing is that the first 10 partitions give the message that the floppy is write protected when you try to format it. It suddenly occurs to me that the flash card might be set on lock. The other two possibilities are that it is an idiosyncracy of the HDM (probably not) or that I can format the partition when I access these partitions via my computer. I probably won't get inside to check the flash card until I switch the HDM to the PSR2100 sometime in July. No matter. There are still 70 partitions to work with.

Now the good stuff. My friend was able to copy all of the pop/rock internal styles and paste them onto one of the partitions. He turned off the keyboard and scrolled to that partiton (If you hold the up or down button down it scrolls quickly) and the styles are automatically recalled.

I have been spending the evening categorizing all my styles into Pop/Rock, Country/Blues, Jazz/Swing, Ballroom, Waltzes, Latin, Piano Styles, World/Misc. and Dance. I will put all of these styles onto different partitions. It will be easy to remember which partition which style is on because I'll only have to know what type of music it is. No more floppy shuffle during my gigs.

My friend didn't mess around or try to get styles to load via the computer. I imagine this works, but it might require some deciphering of the Russian instructions.

I am curious to see if the styles load up faster than the 2 seconds required for regular floppy styles.

The HDM is still inferior to say a hard drive that the Tyros has - you have to deal with partitions and you probably can't access floppy styles and multipads via registration (I'll experiment with this).

I'll keep you posted as I play around with this thing. I can't wait!

Beakybird