Electric Guitars

Perhaps the worst sounding voice on Yamaha home keyboards ( in my opinion ) is the Overdrive and Distortion Guitar. They sound unrealistic and lack fuzzy and crackling distortion. Yamaha has always been known for great sounding synths and their Saw Leads are no exception. Combining them with the Electric guitars is a great way to add distortion. Follow these steps and you will be rocking hard right away.

Step 1: Select the Electric Guitar of your choice.

Step 2: Turn on Dual Voice and select Saw Lead ( if you are not using one of the Synth-Focused portables, select Saw Lead 2 instead ).

Step 3: Press Function and turn the volume of the Main voice ( Guitar ) all the way up ( if you haven't already ).

Step 4: Turn up the volume of the Dual voice ( Synth ) to 96.

Make sure the volume of the Synth does not exceed 96. This makes the Synth less prominent then the Guitar.

Step 5: Play a note ( or a chord ) and hear the difference.

If you are using a keyboard such as the PSR E423, turn the knob assigned to the Cutoff effect all the way up. This affects both voices and adds even more distortion. You can go another step further by plugging your keyboard into a Guitar Amplifier. Small ones are fairly inexpensive.

So which keyboards have the Dual function. Here is a list of Yamaha products currently on the market that include this important feature.

YPT 310-320

PSR E313-E323

All Synth-Focused and Piano-Focused portables.

In the next post I will discuss how to make other voices sound better using the Reverb effect found on every Yamaha keyboard.