Now Playing. "Bad Stuff Happens" by Loren Bouchard & Tim Dacey. Performed by T1na Badgraph1csghost on a Yamaha PSR-290 Portable Arranger.
I had a dream last night that I was playing my old Yamaha PSR-290. Like, more proficiently than I ever actually did; I was playing an entire orchestra and it sounded like a SampleCell II featuring my Fantom X6's piano. I was so glad that everything was back to normal. And then, I woke up and I knew she was gone.
I got my Yamaha in July of 2002 to replace the PSS-480 that my parents got before I was born. They wanted me to pick up music, so they figured on exposing me to as much music as possible, as early as possible. Well, it must have worked, because I'm a composer now. But, anyway, the PSR-290 sounded leaps and bounds ahead of the DX7-sounding thing from the '80s. The pianos sounded like pianos, the strings sounded like strings, the chromatic percussion sounded like vibraphones and marimbas. I set it up in the sitting room next to the Yamaha gear I'd inherited from my gran; a YPP-50 with a QY10 or something MIDI'd up to it. A regular Paul Shaffer setup. Later, I jettisoned the YPP-50 and QY thing and just used the 290 from then until I got my Fantom X in 2008.
I probably pressed every single button on that machine; the chord dictionary was particularly helpful back when I thought I was going to write music on manuscript paper. The only stumbling block I ever encountered was the lack of any modulation or pitchbend control. Being MIDI-compliant, obviously it was capable both of these, but it just couldn't be done without a MIDI controller plugged into it. I always felt that someone should have sold an independent control box with just a mod/pitch control in it; that would have solved all my problems. Oh well, it never happened.
I had to put her in the closet about 3 years ago because middle-C lost its touch sensitivity and the data wheel stopped working. Whilst I could still operate the computer, getting into and out of menus and all that sort of thing, using just the buttons, the wheel made it easier to flip through sounds. When I got her in 2002, I had great fun going into the Patch menu and spinning the wheel as hard as possible, then just playing a song with whatever sound it landed on. Later, when I started seriously writing music, I would use her sequencer as a sketchbook of sorts. She was set too far away from my computer to connect to it, so if I hit upon something good in sketchbook sessions, I'd adapt it on the Fantom X6. "Monty Pythagoras' Flying Theorem" started that way. So did "Imaginary Horse". For some reason, I bought a Casio LK-280 for hanukkah 5779; I don't really know why. I guess it sounded more like a Proteus/2 on the shop floor than it really does; plus, I was sort of interested in the drum sounds. But, it cost $199, and for what? Compared to the 290, it's cheap, it's creaky, the sound quality is horrible, and the sequencer is a pain in the ass to get working. When she stopped working, I naïvely thought, "Oh, I can replace her with the Casio." Only the dumbest idea I've had since I gave the YPP-50 to my uncle and he left it in his garden shed during the hottest year on record.
Technically, the only thing wrong with my Yamaha is that middle C doesn't work. But the synthesiser repair shop is all the way on the other side of town, there's more important work I need done to my Fantom X, and money is incredibly tight right now to the point I can't even do that. Sadly, she's going to have to sit on that shelf for another year.
--27 April 2024--