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The Yamaha PSS-795 portable keyboard is a decent, but not terribly impressive keyboard. It's internal sounds are not programmable and are pretty much PCM. It pre-dates General MIDI, so it is not really useful if that is what you need. It doesn't really have any internal effects (has reverb and sustain buttons, but they are of the "longer decay" type of effect, and not a real reverb.) For sounds, it does have 100 internal sounds, with mixed quality. Samples are obviously reused among the sounds. There are also 50 rhythm styles, for many different styles of music. Most of us only play one of these types of music, so for any given user there are probably only a couple of useful rhythm types. It does have fifty different drum sounds, which are OK but not terribly impressive. There are 8 programmable rhythm pads, which can be assigned to any of the 50 drum sounds. One of the odd bits about this keyboard is it's "Vector Synth" This is a little joystick on the left side which you can use to fade between four different sounds. Of course, since four diffent sounds are playing, this cuts down on your polyphony quite a bit and it becomes easy to overload the number of voices used. Also, the vector synth seems to be very coarse, with maybe 32 steps horizontally or vertically. The keyboard also posesses a pitch-bend wheel in addition to it's vector synth, but it too is quite coarse, with only 25 steps top to bottom, which are easily heard if one sets the bend range to it's maximum 12 note range. The keyboard has an internal sequencer with 8 song memory. Each song can have 5 melody tracks (polyphonic!), a vector synth track, a track for solos on the drum pads, and a track for the auto-accompaniment. The sequencer has simple editing with the ability to record over portions of the current song. This sounds good, but there is no looping capability for the sequencer and no way to quantize or copy sections. Also, although have 8 songs, there aren't really enough storage to record that many songs (only 2800 notes!) Because of those deficiencies I found the sequencer to be nearly useless. If only they had included some form of looping and a better method to make drum loops, like the old PSS-480, it would have been incredibly useful. Like auto-accompaniment on other portable keyboards, there is a mode to generate harmony between soloed notes and the auto-chord backing, but this keyboard also has more harmony options than most, including DUET, TRIO, BLOCK, COUNTRY, OCTAVE, and STRUM. Alas, I wished they could have added something to do 5th or 7th chords instead of merely the octave option. Still, the keyboard is not without it's merits. It's wide variety of sounds makes it good for adding backing to a song, although there are no sounds which stand out as leads, and the bass sounds are particularly weak. There is a really good chorus sound, and the organs, mallet, brass and woodwind sounds are pretty good as well. Strings synth sounds and pianos are not quite as good, but passable as part of a complete performance. The drum sequences are many and varied, which I mentioned earlier means that any given user will only find a few patterns they can really use. The orchestration is decent. All patterns have both a normal section and a bridge section, each with their own orchestration and rhythm parts. In addition, there are fill-in parts to go to and from the bridge, and a seperate ending. The drum sounds, are mostly decent, although it lacks good hi-hat sounds. This synth pre-dates the whole electronica movement, so you won't find any 808 kicks here. As with all Yamaha portable MIDI keyboards, the MIDI implementation is flawless. Even though the keyboard is not velocity-sensitive, it does respond to such data via MIDI. It is fully multi-timbral, the 16 MIDI channels can selectively be turned on and off. In addition, the internal memory can be dumped to a sequencer as system exclusive data. Full active-sensing and MIDI sync data are sent. There is also an option to boost the velocity of incoming MIDI notes, which may be useful in some circumstance. Volume of each MIDI channel may be adjusted independently in 24 steps. In short, the keyboard is decent but not great. I use it primarily for adding backing to my songs with it's vast arsenal of innocuous sounds. If you can get it cheap and don't have anything else, I say go for it. If you want General MIDI, forget it. If you have some money, you might want to go for one of Yamaha's newer portable keyboards.
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