Having had several PSR keyboards over the last 25 years, the PSR330
my last, I have always just used the simplest single finger mode to
play the accompianments. The PSR2000 is a much more powerful
instrument than I have ever played before. I've had mine 4 weeks now
and still have basically used the single finger mode. That is until 3
days ago when I downloaded Gary Diamond's gig disk #1 from the PSR
Tutorial site. This disk is a great collection of favorite songs in
style format that loaded perfectly into my PSR2000. The first thing I
noticed when starting to play the first song is that Gary had his
preferences setup in the registrations. Full Finger mode was the
default on all his songs. As luck would have it I just started
playing full chords and went thru a few of the styles before
realizing that while a chord progression was playing you could play a
left hand selected voice OVER the chord playing! You can really add
some embellishments to the style playing this way.......I mean it
really blowed me away on how much better the styles could be by
adding extra left hand notes to an already playing style. I tried the
same thing by going back to single finger mode and could not
accomplish the same thing. For me this is really a pioneering
newfound discovery and I spent the next several hours playing some
older styles I was familier with in full fingered mode adding extra
left hand with very surprizing results. It didn't take that long to
get comfortable playing full chords either. I thought I read the
manual thoroughly but never heard of this before. Maybe all you full
fingered players already discovered this?
So LISTEN all you single finger players...........You are really
missing a lot by not at least trying full finger mode. Does anyone
use any of the "intelligent" fingering modes? I haven't quite
figured them out yet..................I'm really looking forward to
using all those chords and progressions I have been studying!!
Happy Playing -- charley

I certainly second your endorsement of full-fingered mode. I use it almost exclusively. It requires that you know how to finger chords, of course, but, since it doesn't recognize anything until you press at least three keys simultaneously, you can embellish your playing with your left hand adding individual notes here and there. Play the chord and the accompaniment keeps going on that chord while you could play a chord arpeggio if you want or anything else. In mixed mode, if you hit any single key, the accompaniment immediately moves to that chord. If you are trying to finger chords, but you don't hit them all at the same time, you might have two or three chords sounding before you get the chord you want. If you are going to try fingered mode, forget the Mixed option.

Gary's Gig Disk is filled with styles that happen to be named for a song that they go with. When you load that style, no registration is being loaded. Some of those do have OTS settings and the OTS will be loaded, but no registrations. And I don't think the chord fingering is saved in the OTS. When you set chord fingering, I believe it stays that way until you manually set it to something different. But, however, you stumbled on to that mode, it is lots of fun to play that way. Almost all of the styles available at http://psrtutorial.com have OTS settings and the left hand is usually turned ON thus adding another instrument to the overall mix -- if you can finger your chords!

Be sure to try working through the "Secrets of Chord Progressions" at that site and, after a couple of months, you will know several hundred chords. I've been working on those chords with my left hand and, if you do the exercises, it does make a difference.

Never understood why they called it single finger chords because a number of them still require 3 notes to be press, in which case its better to learn fingered chording from the start.
On another subject. A friend of mine marks all his flats & sharps on sheet music with a red marker, how ever is he going to learn and remember a key this way?
Now he can not play any music he has not already marked.

Graham UK


[This message has been edited by Graham UK (edited 03-15-2003).]

Like Joe I use full fingered mode exclusively. Wouldn't know what to do with the other modes. I have terrible trouble with my friend's keyboard as it doesn't have full fingered mode and I have to play around with keyboard splits - AARGH!!

I'm afraid I messed up my terminology. I use fingered mode. There is also a full keyboard mode, but I don't use that. I finger the chords but only with my left hand playing behind that split point.