Yamaha PSR340 Portable Keyboard

July 23, 1999 -- Yamaha Corporation of America, Pro Audio & Combo Division, Portable Keyboards, continues its leadership position in the portable keyboard market with the introduction of the new PSR340 Portable Keyboard. The PSR340 will ship in the third quarter of 1999.

"I believe the PSR340 represents one of the finest keyboard values in the world," states Jim Presley, marketing manager, Portable Keyboards. "The volume of portable keyboards produced by Yamaha worldwide, combined with more than 100 years of keyboard building/designing heritage and world leadership in both computer and music technologies, makes it all possible."

The Yamaha PSR340 is the first portable keyboard at this affordable price to include a disk drive, making it a powerful and complete unit. Imagine having a computer with no disk drive or hard drive. You would have no way to load additional software or save your work. It's the same with electronic keyboards. With Yamaha's PSR340, you can now write and arrange songs as well as save them to disk. If you don't want to bother writing out the music for a song, you can just record it as it is being performed. Just push the record button and play!

What's more; you can download song files from among the thousands on the Internet onto a 3.5-in. disk in your computer, then take the same disk, insert it into the PSR340 and play the song. You can also purchase MIDI song files from your local music store; one disk can hold many titles. Your PSR340 now becomes a stereo. The backlit display allows you to select a song from the disk by name. To play the song, just push the start button, sit back and enjoy.

In addition to having access to all the of MIDI song files from the Internet, friends and family can send you song files. They can even attach them to e-mail. How would you like to be able to re-create your granddaughter's first song, exactly as she played it?

The new "Yamaha Portable Grand" feature is included in the PSR340. This feature is immediately apparent when you see the large, piano-shaped button in the center of the front panel. When you push it, the best piano is automatically chosen and the auto-accompaniment is turned off, putting the keyboard in "full keyboard mode," just like a real piano. In addition, a piano accompaniment style is automatically selected and is waiting for you if you choose to use it. Next to the piano button is a metronome-shaped button, giving you a built in metronome for practice.

Also incorporated into the PSR340 is the Yamaha Education Suite (YES), which comes complete with Chord Dictionary, Smart Chord, EZ Chord and Melody Guide. The Chord Dictionary tells you what chord you are currently playing or how to play a chord needed for a song. Smart Chord helps beginners play chords, with one finger, that are musically correct; in the past, easy-play keyboards required two or three fingers to play minor and seventh chords.

In addition to showing you how to play chords, the Melody Guide demonstrates how to play the melody of any song in the internal library. EZ Chord, available in the PSR270, lets you pre-program all the chords in a song, allowing users to concentrate on right-hand melody.

The Yamaha PSR340 represents a breakthrough price for a portable keyboard with a disk drive. The ability to save your music and bring in music from the outside makes the PSR340 the right instrument for anyone searching for a first keyboard.

For more information, visit Yamaha at www.yamaha.com