Looking over the number of electronic keyboards that Yamaha currently offers (excluding digital pianos), if a list were generated that shows the most advanced first and works its way down to the most basic last, what would it look like? It would be a safe bet that the Genos would be at the ... More on yamahamusicians.com

Before I got into synthesizers, my dream machine was the Yamaha PSR-47. In terms of price, it was way out of my league as a teenager - a whopping 1245 Dutch guilders in 1990 (equivalent to 2700 euros these days). What I could afford, however, was the Juno-60 in the same store - which cost only 500 guilders. Well, you know what Junos are worth these days ;) As a small act of revenge, a few years ago I picked up the PSR-48 (same thing, different logo) for the insane price of... 50 euros. Besides the unit itself, a wobbly cheap stand, a power supply and a manual were included. In that manual there was a brochure of the store this was purchased at, which listed models and prices around that time. I've scanned this and included it here. Back then I had that brochure as well, and I read it religiously. I had some more synthesizer literature - Roland's 1988 product line up, and even a booklet with the Jupiter 8, Juno-60 and all that in there, and several of those single sheet brochures for the JX8P and Alpha Juno which had amazing product photography. I dreamt of these things. I didn't know what they sounded like, but they looked so amazing, so they probably must sound amazing too. Right? I mean, check out https://retrosynthads.blogspot.com/2020/04/roland-jx-8p-pg-800-simple-to-operate.html and https://techsmechs.wordpress.com/2015/11/14/roland-catalog-1983/ . It's beautiful! Sadly, I no longer have these brochures, but I do have the R Is For Roland book . Anyway, back to the Yamaha PSRs. I always wanted to do a little op-ed for this, so here we go. What Is A Synthesizer? You often have people posting here about "hey I found a synthesizer at the local Goodwill" and then they post a picture of something like the PSR, or PSS, or some Casio. Often you'll see two kinds of reactions: "that's not a synthesizer" "ignore that, that's totally a synthesizer" I used to be in the former camp , but I've since nuanced my opinion on this a bit. Let me be clear - even when I wouldn't call it a synthesizer, I've never considered it an issue that people are posting those things here. People care about inclusivity, electronic instruments don't. Transistor organs? Fine. Rhodes or Wurli? Fine. Digital pianos? Fine. It's got keys, it involves electricity somewhere, and the more folks who get into this, the merrier, and one of the biggest memory holes these days IMO is having not enough high-resolution pictures and detailed descriptions of arrangers and organs. It's all good, and sometimes you can find quirky and interesting devices that get snowed under because they're not considered synthesizers. So, if you ask me - come in, the gates are open! "But should I call that thing a synthesizer?" Yes. You are getting a synthesizer - just not very much of one. Generally, people want to make their own sounds on synthesizers, and these devices just don't really let you do any of that - or if they do, they're very limited. If you have to perform and you're expecting something with lots of knobs, and a slightly clueless but helpful roadie shows up with one of these - you're probably not going to be happy, because it likely won't be useful for what you want to use it for. Then again, a TB303 is also very limited, and very few people would say that it's "not a synthesizer". It is. It's just not very much of one, because it has very limited controls. To me it's not about the technical bits- it's about expectation management. To be honest, there's a bit of gatekeeping here as well. Synthesizers are "serious instruments", and things like these get called all kinds of names varying from "romplers" to "toys" so we're clear about who's where on the ladder. Just show up at Gearspace with such a post if you want to receive the full brunt of that, or rather, don't ;) If you ask Wikipedia for the definition of a synthesizer, it's "an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals .". It's just that this particular definition is so watered down that it's borderline useless, because an electronic doorbell would qualify as a synthesizer (Kraftwerk used a calculator, so you can't tell me I can't use a doorbell); if you call everything a synthesizer, the term stops being useful. It's basically the taxonomy problem all over again. Ask a biologist what a fish is - it's complicated . The same thing happened with the word "computer" - that same 303 is "Computer Controlled" but nobody's going to mistake the microprocessor inside for a modern day laptop. Anyway, now that you have this - what can you do with it? It turns out - quite a bit . It all of course depends on your expectations . More on reddit.com

I've searched around, and there's a lot of info on this forum which is super helpful. But I've never found a full history of the P-series all in one place. For example: P120 (GH) -> P155 (GH) -> P255 (GH) -> P515 (NWX) -> P525 (GT-S) I think this is the correc... More on forum.pianoworld.com

Take him to a music store with a budget. Instruments are very personal. More on reddit.com