First Yamaha’s keyboard that I got was PSR-225GM. That was about $200-$250 and I had never dealt with anything more expensive before that.

Then, about 2 years later I bought PSR-550 and that gave me some feeling of deep satisfaction.

It did everything I wanted it to do – it allowed to mute or revoice style’s parts, all settings were quickly reachable due to ‘direct access’ button (you could assign numeric keys for that purpose too).

Then about 2 years later I bought PSR-3000 (a slightly used one with attractive price). Of course, there were a lot to impress again – especially 4 times more polyphony and lots of ‘Sweet’ and ‘Cool’ sounds.

But eventually I started to think, that sometimes it’s nice to have something less expensive – for example, if you play in some pub and you want to leave a keyboard there.

So, anyway, low-range and middle-range keyboards are not necessary for beginners only.

So, I started to learn about nowadays affordable keyboards. Logically you could imagine that if there were PSR-550 ten years ago, that allows you to think, that today there’s a better replacement for that.

But I guess, Yamaha’s marketing department revealed that $1000 or less keyboards should be attractive for beginners. They introduced PSR-s500 – there were no 16 small buttons under the screen like on PSR-550 that allowed you to control you accompaniment.

There were no Direct-access button. And there were no numeric keys – because there’s probably no point for a player to have a quick access to voices that he uses the most (I still remembers numbers of my favorite sounds on keyboards that I used a long time ago).

Recently they introduced PSR-s550. It has what PSR-550 ached to have – double polyphony, usb-to-device jack, lots of decent sounds.

They thought this time that it’s a right thing to do to allow users to mute parts of an accompaniment. But they still try to keep a minimal amount of buttons, because they think that this keyboard still has to be for inexperienced users and lots of buttons can be scary. So there’s no Re-voice button (you can do it by editing style with style creator option), there’s no Freeze button, no ‘voice set’ function, and they merged tracks buttons with registrations buttons that can be pretty risky when playing live. Still, there’s no numeric pad and no direct access.

Speaking about low-range, there’s PSR-e4x3 series – in some way better than PSR-s550 due to controllers that allow to quickly setup a lot of options, numeric pad works better for me, but overall this is more like a keyboard for fun.

There’s also one interesting thing called Yamaha MM6. Speaking shortly, it can do a lot of nice things and in some way it offers unique opportunities, but it’s not very suitable to work in traditional genres.


So, the cheapest way today to have every advantage of PSR-550 is PSR-s710, that is 2,5 times more expensive.


I believe Yamaha is right anyway. That’s true, that most people want a keyboard to be easy to use and the first thing they care about is how it sounds. But for my point of view – PSR-s500 and PSR-s550 is example of degradation in low/middle-range of keyboards.

Hi Sergei (kabinopus),

Hows it going in Russia?
Very Interesting take on Yamaha's possible reasoning for it's budget model arranger line options.
I tend to agree with your points about sound and easy to use features the top priorities.
Btw, I've really enjoyed our music and 'cross cultural' Skype voice and video chats. - Scott

Hello Scottyee,

Since I’m wondering about budget arrangers… I guess it’s okay here )

I’d like to confess that our conversation via Skype was some new experience for me and frankly speaking I was so scared that I tried really hard not to close my laptop since I felt really silly not being able to compose any appropriate sentences. But I guess there’s no way to do anything new without feeling silly.

I understand that what I wrote about keyboards shouldn’t necessarily concern anyone on this forum. In fact considering usual cost of things and services middle class arrangers are not that precious. But I’m a little disappointed that PSR-S550 could be something balanced and flexible but failed it due to simplification of interface.