Yamaha PSR 740 Review by John Romero (Organ and Keyboard World Dec 1999)

I first ran across the new Yamaha PSR 740 keyboard at the Gunton Hall festival a couple of months ago and Richard Bower of Yamaha was kind enough to give me a guided tour of the beastie. I must confess, I was pleasantly surprised with the quality and facilities of the instrument and duly persuaded Yamaha to loan me a keyboard so that we could review it.

The 740 weighs in at a mere 10.2kg and is very portable, helped by it having a separate power transformer, thus reducing its weight. It is presented in a stylish black and silver livery with two fairly large backlit LCD screens smack bang in the middle above the five octave (61 notes) keyboard. At each end of the instrument are large speaker grills which conceal two speakers (the bass ports are located at each end below the keys). According to the manual the amplification delivers 6 watts per side. Now this surprised me as I thought it was more when listening to it. Working from left to right you are presented with the on / off switch (every instrument should have one) and two volume dials, one for overall output and one for line in or mic input. To the right of these are buttons for recording, (song, style or multi pads) DSP control buttons and just to the left of the screen are five buttons controlling Help, EQ, Harmony/Echo, Touch and Sustain. Next come the two screens, the upper one of which varies its display. This usually gives menu’s for sounds, rhythms and the deeper aspects of the instruments programming and is dependent on which of the control buttons is pressed. The lower slightly larger screen shows activity meters for each accompaniment part playing at any given time. Other information contained here includes which chord is being played, tempo, global transpose settings, measure and beat indicators. Either side of the screens are buttons for guiding the player through the various menu’s and below a whole host of buttons which double up as accompaniment mute buttons or drawbar flute selectors (more on these in a while). To the right of the screens are control buttons for access to voices, effects, vocal harmony, functions, songs, styles, tempo, transpose, accompaniment balance and a numerical keypad for inputting data. Below is a data wheel and disk drive controls. Below all this are yet more buttons for control of rhythms, registration memories, multi pads, vocal harmony and left and right parts. Now we’ve got the layout out of the way, down to the workings of the instrument.

The quality of their instrument sounds are one of the things that Yamaha have always prided themselves on and the 740 is no exception. The basic set of voices are all AWM samples and follow the General Midi order from 0-127. Added to this are the Sweet Voices, which are in stereo and have twice as much memory allocated to them. This extra memory gives better tonal and nuance control of the sound being reproduced. A further addition is a set of XG sounds. XG sounds are an extension of the GM sound set, the difference being that their parameters can be altered, i.e. attack, delay et, etc. It has to be said that these sounds are good but be warned, they are a nightmare to find as there seems to be no logical order in their layout. I suppose in time you will get to know the numbers allocated to the ones you like, but in between times you’ll just have to scroll the long lists to find just what you are looking for. On the plus side, although these sounds cannot be edited from the panel of the 740, if the instrument is connected to a computer with XG Works installed, all sorts of things can be achieved. I particularly liked some of the brass and sax sounds and you should check these out when listening to the keyboard. On the whole the sounds stand up very well on their own without any signal processing. Nowadays we seem to be becoming used to heavily processed sounds with lots of echo and effects added to them and here in lies yet another strength of this versatile instrument as the DSP effect are both good, varied and could keep you occupied for hours, if so desired. I left the organ section to last when dealing with the sound section as I wanted to make special comment on it. Yamaha’s organ sounds are very good and not only does it have some very usable organ samples, it is also equipped with digital drawbars. Here lies a warning though. Digital drawbars are normally quite hard to adjust on the fly, this applies to just about all keyboards I have come across. The 740's are not easy and are nigh on impossible. They sound good and are very playable but fiddling with the adjustments will almost certainly take longer than you will have in a song to get right. Consequently to get the most from them, you will have to make good use of the panel memories and store them there for future use.

I found the rhythm section of this keyboard to be quite comprehensive. 160 rhythms each with four variations, each variation having a fill and the whole style having an intro and two endings, one simple, one a little more complicated. This instrument surpasses the PSR8000 as the rhythms have four variations per style instead of two. I am looking forward though to the PSR 9000 as there are two fills per variation and this will bring the 9000 up to what seems to be the industries current unofficial standard. The styles included on a keyboard often give a good idea of the manufacturers target market and I don’t think it would be unfair to say this instrument seems to be aimed mainly at two main groups. In no order of preference these appear to be the younger more "rocky" type player (the Dixons or Curries type market) with the inclusion of some good beat and disco type patterns, and an older player (the music shop market, I’d love to say the more educated market but I won’t as I’ll probably get into trouble for it) with more interest in swing and strict tempo. The latter includes an excellent guitar waltz that I loved and a full section of Ballroom rhythms. Other strengths lay in the Country section. The other section I was impressed with was the Pianist section. As the name implies, the rhythms are played only on a piano. The rhythms are very usable on the 740, although I found a few (particularly one or two of the endings) a little naive. Another item that caught my attention was a nice trick with the endings. Strike the button twice and the ending slows down, it is very smooth and is very effective.

J.R.