Hi! I'm still looking for a keyboard - haven't gotten to the music store yet. Anyway, I was wondering if this is possible:

I might like to connect whatever keyboard I get with my Yamaha PSS-640 and then possibly later a set of MIDI bass pedals (like an organ). (I don't have pedals yet - I'm just thinking about that down the road.)

That way, I could have a sort of virtual "organ" with two keyboards and pedals. The old 640 would be the lower keyboard, and the new keyboard would be the upper keyboard and sound source.

The keyboards I'm looking at have MIDI In and Out, and my PSS-640 has MIDI In, Out, and Thru.

Does anybody know how I would connect these so that the sounds from the new keyboard could be played on both keyboards and the bass pedals?

Just wondering,

Cindy G.

Thanks, Dave! What exactly is a MIDI merge, and how is that done?

Cindy G.

Oh, Dave - never mind, I found out what a MIDI merge is. Duh!! I'll just have to figure out how many INs I'll need... but I'm getting ahead of myself - I need a keyboard first! : )

Cindy G.

Thanks again, Dave! I wasn't planning on getting a synth for the "lower keyboard" - I already have an older portable keyboard that I was planning to use.

However, that keyboard doesn't have touch sensitivity, and the keys are less than full size. So, I had considered maybe using a controller instead.

I'm not planning on doing this right away - maybe sometime down the road.

Thanks again for the help!

Cindy G.

The Yamaha PSR-7000 and up have special support for MIDI pedals, and by using Keyboard Split one can get the effect of an Upper and Lower Manual from just the one keyboard. I have a set of Fatar MIDI pedals, but wish I’d gotten the Roland instead: the Fatar ones have fewer controls and no velocity response. But they are a couple hundred dollars cheaper.


My PSR-7000 can accept input from MIDI pedals on any one MIDI channel (I use Channel 11, which is also the default output channel for the Bass part of Styles), and use it for any of the following uses:

• Manual MIDI bass — just like an organ!
• Auto MIDI bass — pedalboard bass changes the “Bass Root” of a chord played with an Auto-Accompaniment Style (thus allowing chords such as C7/G, or more easily specifying that A, C, D, and F is supposed to be an F6 and not a Dmin7), sort of like using Fingering 2 mode (where the lowest note is always the Bass Root) but without having to allocate nearly two whole octaves to the Auto-Accompaniment split part of the keyboard, leaving more notes for other things.
• Panel Control — perhaps the coolest of all! Transforms the MIDI pedal board into thirteen assignable footswitches, able to toggle or trigger just about any binary or one-shot setting on the keyboard! You can assign pedal keys to do things like, say, pressing F for Fill-In #1, F# for Fill-In #2, B for a Rhythm Break, Eb for Ending #1, E for Ending #2, low C to activate previous Stored Registration, high C to activate next Stored Registration, other notes to trigger such things as Multi-Pads, toggle Right-Hand Harmony on and off, play any individual drum sound, etc. etc. etc., while still using the two available Foot Switch jacks for the usual Sustain and some other function!
• A sub-mode of Panel Control lets you play Auto-Accomp. Style chords with the MIDI pedals -- you could, for instance, assign C and F Major, Gdom7, A and D and Emin7, etc. to the respective pedals, thus having a typical chord-set for the Key of C Major (or likewise adjust for any other Key). Then you can play full two-handed piano-style music with riffs and arpeggios and even piano silences that thus wouldn’t be able to trigger chords using the otherwise-nifty Full Keyboard Auto-Accomp Mode, and still have Auto-Accompaniment that changes chords when you want! (Of course you can do something similar by using the Chord Sequence feature of the Multi-Pads, and both methods require substantial pre-show set-up and thus couldn’t easily be used for surprise request songs in a live performance.)

The PSR-8000 and 9000 maintain most of these abilities so far as I know, though they may call them different things.

Dear Cindy,

I've actually got MY PSS-680 MIDI'd too a Korg Poly-800, a PSR-500, and a PSR-630. What you get selling these things after a while is so little that I hang on to my old gear. I use a "Pocket Thru" to put things together. There are all kinds of MIDI switches to configue these things.

Anyway, MY conclusion is: I wouldn't bother. There are so many possibilities of voices and layering in the 630 that I really don't bother turning on any of the others now at all (but the whole setup looks rather impressive with the various tiered keyboards on an "A Frame" Stand. When you add all these keyboards together you eventually end up with something I would describe as "noise". Frequently less is more.

Also, the main reason I hooked these together is that I thought I might be able to "combine" styles from different PSRs. The main problem with this is that even if you set the tempo of two different PSRs to be the same, and start them at the same time, they tend to "drift apart" so that pretty soon your "cha-cha" plus "rhumba" sounds horrible. There are devices to keep them together in time but I believe they are somewhat expensive and I never looked into it since I found that there are an inexhaustable supply of Yamaha Styles floating around the net, so that the need to create something new by combining PSR styles isn't very important.

Of course, YOU may like these layered effects. If you tried to sell your 680 I'm sure you'd end up keeping it when you find out what you could get for it. When you get your new keyboard MIDI it together with the old PSS-680 (MIDI OUT of one into MIDI IN of the other) and play around. You don't need to buy anything extra to do this and it is quite interesting and instructive if nothing else.

Cheers,

Bob