Please share some of the Yamaha Sx900 features you like the best. Share sum of the negatives to.

John C.

PS, I have both Roland Ea7, and the Yamaha Sx900, looking for ideas.
John C.

I’m not ready yet to say something negative about the SX900 but I will say that I still need my Roland Juno DS76 when I want to play just piano or electric piano. Had to rearrange some furniture to make them both accessible. I often think that the location of the instrument can be as vital as the instrument itself.

Five Likes:

1. Three right hand voices with Voice effects
2. Touch Screen is excellent
3. Chord Looper (Just now experimenting, I can see the possibilities)
4. Playlist. Way better than Music Finder
5. Free Expansion Packs

Five Dislikes:

1. OS Updates, or rather the lack of
2. Style Category. The location of styles has changed too much.
3. Drum Editing, very little can be changed
4. Midi player control. I can't figure out how to quickly rewind to a song, maybe I'm missing something, but no shortcut to the beginning of a song?
5. VH is OK, but no better than OK

All that being said, I love the SX-900

I just figured it out. A simple quick tap on the reverse button takes the song back to the very beginning. Holding down the reverse button takes you back in steps.

The best thing about the PSR-SX900 and ANY Yamaha MOTL or TOTL arranger, is their highly refined Style File Format (SFF). Also, the huge library of styles that are available. But as a less-skilled player, I would probably use the SX900 in a two-board setup, driven by MIDI notes coming from... a Roland! (see my other post here):
http://www.synthzone.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/502636#Post502636

Since the original Tyros, Yamaha's premier chord recognition mode is called "AI Fingered." Some less-skilled players including me find it frustrating, because pressing a single key triggers a unison [1+8], instead of the more common and expected major chord. This makes fast progressions more difficult to play relative to other brands. A minimum of two fingers (in root position) are required for major chords; this sometimes necessitates repositioning the whole hand to reach the third above. In other cases, a minimum of three keys must be pressed to avoid triggering an "on bass" chord, because bass inversion is an implicit behavior instead of an independently-controlled function (as on Roland, Korg, Ketron.)

At the very least, there should be a menu option that allows single notes to be acknowledged as major chords (i.e., instead of unison.) Making this a user option would leave no one worse off. The SX900 has some other modes that allow one-finger majors, but these modes have other serious limitations. And ALL modes occasionally require pressing keys that aren't actually part of the chord, to trigger the desired behavior. After years of testing and playing my favorite scores back to back on Roland and Yamaha arrangers, I've concluded that Roland has easier, more convenient chord recognition for my playing style and the types of music I like to play.

In almost every respect the SX900 is a great board. But chord fingering is hugely important! Until Yamaha implements Roland's chord recognition modes, there will always be a Roland in my stable. Ironically, many years ago Roland released a firmware update to incorporate Yamaha's simplified chord recognition as an optional mode in the menus. So why doesn't Yamaha reciprocate?? It would make it easier for Roland players to transition from what now looks to be a defunct brand, and may even result in "conquest" sales! My $.02.

I've got an SX900 and agree with everybody!

I'd add that the touch screen makes life so much easier compared to my previous Tyros 3 The sounds are audibly better. I also love the programmable buttons, it makes everything I need to get at quickly a single button press.


Negative - the keyboard as an update on the usual PSR version and it is better but it's definitely not as good as the FSX version in the Tyros / Genos. So if you couldn't live with the old PSR keybed I'm not sure this will change your mind but I can certainly live with it.

The day they bring out a 76 Sx900 (no speakers to keep weight down) I might be tempted to add it to my rig. But probably only if they add that awesome pedal steel system from the Genos...

I wonder how many owners are fully leveraging the 8 part chord sequencer? It’s an absolute game changer for a style user... Conventional chord sequencers force you into a rigid structure if you use one for a whole song. But splitting verse, chorus, solos etc. into their own sub-sequence allows you to be as free with how you structure the song as if you were actually playing the chords yourself!

IMHO, it’s the most significant core feature to get introduced to arrangers in a decade...

Interesting. Where can we get more info?

I'm sure it's nice. And what makes it nice is that it's integrated. But it's really not "new." Almost the same functionality could have been accomplished years ago with two arrangers MIDI'd together, or even an arranger and a MIDI song player with "mark-and-jump" functionality. Yes, it would take a little effort to get it set up but you could bank your favorite progressions as songs (or non-transposing style tracks), with different time signatures. Just an imaginative special case of general functionality that's been there all along.

Not just integrated, but run tactilely from the touch screen...

Sure, sky's the limit if you want to cobble together disparate instruments, software and hardware... You could just as easily hand program an arranger from scratch if you had the skill, time and money! But let's not kid ourselves. We don't!

This is what makes Yamaha's new CS the game changer. You don't need a PhD in MIDI and software control to do it any more. You just play in the chords and save it. There's even software that can LISTEN to music audio and figure out the damn chords if you can't do it yourself or look them up online..!

Nothing's 'new'..? If you were a genius, you could have built a jet and flown it before the first guy did. But you didn't. To my knowledge, NOBODY has done this before. Second guessing the feature is a cheap shot, IMHO.

It's as big a leap forward for style players as Markers in SMF's were for sequence users. You aren't locked into one linear song structure any more, you can be as free as you want, you can still do all your normal style things, change styles, drop in fills where you feel like, change from the CS to your own played chords and back at will, sky's the limit.

But yes. it IS 'new'. Up to this point, chord sequencers were ALL one sequence only. One loop, no more. Yamaha changed that, and anyone with an SX900 or Genos that isn'y using it is missing out on finally freeing up their left hand for more musical things than rote chord input without having to compromise on free song structure. I realize that some of us may have extremely limited LH playing skills, but a lot of us don't. Hopefully, those with more traditional two handed skills can see the revolutionary nature of this 'new' feature!

Tell you what... You can currently drop in Markers and using a computer or tablet, move around freely (in sync) in an audio backing track. But no arranger can do it yet, standalone. So, when the first arranger comes out that can do this, feel free to tell us it's not 'new', OK? LOL