I love my DJX (Yamaha PSR-D1)

Member Name: Jammy

Product:	Yamaha PSR-D1
Date:	03/08/00 (1408 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great price

Disadvantages: Limited effects

If you're new to keyboards and making electronic music or not, the Yamaha DJX is an excellent value keyboard. For round about £200 you get a decent machine with an excellent range of sounds.

It has lots of pre-programmed tunes and drum patterns and you can turn on and off various elements of each pattern as it plays to create youyr own "mix".

While this is fun for a while, the novelty of this soon wears off..and it is now that the keyboard's strenghts really come out.

Plug this beauty into the back of PC with a sound card. Fire up a sequencer like Cakewalk or Cubase and you've just entered the realm of professional sounding music, limited only by your imagination (and your ability to suss out the manual, which is not the clearest of things.)

Combining the sounds on the keyboard with samples on the soundcard is relatively easy. But forget the manual for help in getting this set up. Search the internet for files and help (try the Yamaha Forum).

I've got an AWE64 Gold soundcard. Not bad in its day, but when I play a MIDI file via the DJX, the sounds are much richer, and deeper than the sound card. And with the full velocity keys on the DJX (this means that the harder you hit the keys, the louder the sound), you've got a great package for £200.

Of course you can buy better keyboards, with better sounds, and better options for tweaking those sounds, but you'll be looking at £600 plus for those.

The drawback with the DJX is although you can tweak the sounds as they come out of the speakers with various knobs and things, none of these messages are transmitted via MIDI. This means that the lovely filter sweep you made on a synth with the facia knob, doesn't get put into your sequenceer track. So when you play it back, that effect is lost. Still, it's easier to go into the track on the sequencer and draw in the effect anyway. So i don't think it's a problem.


So all in all, a great buy. Especially if you can find one second hand.

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