I would not consider myself musically gifted, I have never been able to learn music with ease, I can't read music very well and I'm not the best singer. I do however try my best, I play guitar at a reasonable level, I sometimes play and sing in front of people and I also have a small dabble on the piano. My piano skill are very basic, they came from simply playing on my sisters keyboard back in the day. Recently though my sister was selling off some of her worldly goods in an effort to raise funds for a move to Kenya. One of the things she was parting with was this Yamaha keyboard.

This is quite an old model and there are certainly better ones on the market. However, she only wanted £10 for the keyboard so I tonight I would snap it up and have a play. There was no charger with this as hers had broken, so I had to buy one of eBay but this only cost me £8. So now I have it set up and have been playing around on it for a few weeks.

The Yamaha PSR-270 has lots of interesting functions and different things you can play around with. To be honest I don't use them all and don't even understand some of them and as I have no instruction booklet some are still a bit of a mystery to me. The function I use most often is without a doubt the voices. There are loads of different sounds you can play. So basically when you play the notes, they sound like different instruments. The most well known is obviously piano, but I also really like the strings. There are instruments ranging from guitars to drums so you can really make a vast mix of sounds.

Another feature that some will enjoy is the list of backing tracks you can get going. Lots of different beats and styles of music that you can play along to. There is also a six track recording function, with this you can record some chords or notes and then play it back, then you can play over it to make a song. There is a simple little LCD display which tells you what settings you are using and what the options are.

The sound this makes is pretty good. The volume control is easy to work and you can get it quite loud if that is what you want. There are 61 keys in total on the keyboard so this is a decent size and will give you a good variety of notes that you can play. It's not the lightest keyboard in the world so if you are planning on transporting it about with you it can be a little bit bulky.

Back in the day these keyboards were over £100 but now you can pick up a second hand one for next to nothing. The technology and sound has moved on so for the pros these keyboards are not really up to scratch anymore. However, if like me you just want something to play around on then this keyboard should suit you just fine. This one has been in our family for around ten years now and it still works very well and produces a good quality sound, so obviously this has been a good value keyboard for us over the years. So my overall impression of this keyboard is that whilst there are certainly much better ones out there now, this still is nice for a bit of a practice and would be good for someone learning.