Product Review - Yamaha YPG-235 76-Key Portable Grand Piano
With the YPG Portable Grand Piano series, Yamaha has created a super portable keyboard jam-packed with fun and useful features for a very low price. This unit is perfect for piano students, as it includes Yahama's comprehensive, built-in learning suite. But experienced players should not discount this instrument. Its computer connectivity, 6-track recorder, and an enormous collection of panel and XGlite voices and drum/SFX kits make it a great tool for advanced pianists as well. Your creative possibilities with this keyboard are as large as you let them be.
The YPG-235 has 76 piano style keys, only 12 shy of a full-sized keyboard. The keys are non-weighted, but feature Yamaha's Graded Soft Touch (GST) technology, which offers a choice of varying levels of resistance. This is an important feature to help beginners gradually and gently accustom their fingers to the higher resistance, weighted keys found in acoustic and digital pianos.
Although the YPG-235 is a low-cost keyboard, Yamaha did not skimp at all on sound quality for this instrument. It boasts a powerful, clear, and precise sound. Its 2-way speaker system has separate woofers and tweeters for more lifelike voices. Yamaha guarantees that all of their brand keyboards are true stereo. Bass Boost, Advanced Wave Memory (AWM), and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) are all incorporated into the YPG-235 sound system to create an enhanced and realistic sound experience. Yamaha also provides you with the next level of sound control with 5 different master equalizer (EQ) settings.
Yamaha Education Suite is a tool that no piano student should pass up. I had already been taking piano lessons for over five years when I got my hands on a Yamaha keyboard with the Education Suite. Even though I had a great piano teacher, the Education Suite play-along lessons, the grading feature, and especially the chord dictionary helped me in many areas; from ear training, to sight reading, to becoming comfortable with different chord formations. The 30 built-in songs (and 70 more in the included CD-ROM) and different lesson modes make practicing piano fun and constructive. A metronome is also built in to the YPG-235.
Even though this portable piano is such a great tool for beginners, I doubt that more seasoned players will get bored with it very quickly. The depth of features on the YPG-235 is truly inexhaustible. There are 489 Voices (116 regular voices + 361 XGlite voices + 12 Drum/SFX Kits), 150 styles (with auto-accompaniment function - very fun), and 18 effects, including reverb, chorus, harmony and transpose. A pitch bend wheel is also included to add some extra spice. One feature I can never get enough of with Yamaha keyboards is the 6-track sequencer. It's a great thing to play around with all the features I've mentioned - the voices, the dual voice layering, splitting, harmonies and other effects - find just the right sound, and record your own creation. With 6-tracks you can compose some pretty complex pieces of music. The keyboard has a Flash ROM memory, and can be connected to a computer through USB, widening your creative possibilities. It's fun to pretend to be Hans Zimmer for a couple hours with a Yamaha equipped with these recording and MIDI features.
The YPG-235 has a 32 Note Polyphony and 16 Part Multi Timbrel which should keep you from dropping notes and sounds. Polyphony is the number of notes that can be held at once. 32 is typically enough for most people. The only time it gets tricky is when you have a very dense legato passage where you are trying to sustain more than 32 notes at a time. What happens then is the keyboard will drop some notes in order to keep others sounding. The 16 Part Multi Timbrel is a very important feature on keyboards with multi-track recording capabilities, since you need to be able to layer many voices on top of each other.
Here is a quick rundown of some other YPG-235 features:
-back-lit 92mm x 42mm custom LCD
-sustain pedal jack
-headphone jack (great for private practicing)
-music rest
The Yamaha YPG-235 is very portable. It weighs in at only 8.3kg (18 lbs. 5 oz). Its dimensions are (W x H x D) 46-3/8" x 5-3/8" x 16-1/4". It comes a nice silver color called Champagne Gold. This portable keyboard would be the perfect instrument to have in college or in an apartment where there is simply no room for an acoustic or larger digital piano, or simply for the piano player who can't put down the thousands of dollars that a "real" piano would cost.
The Yamaha YPG-235 76-Key Portable Grand Piano has been around since 2008, and is still a bestseller. It is the perfect combination of functionality, sound quality, and plain fun.
The YPG-235 has 76 piano style keys, only 12 shy of a full-sized keyboard. The keys are non-weighted, but feature Yamaha's Graded Soft Touch (GST) technology, which offers a choice of varying levels of resistance. This is an important feature to help beginners gradually and gently accustom their fingers to the higher resistance, weighted keys found in acoustic and digital pianos.
Although the YPG-235 is a low-cost keyboard, Yamaha did not skimp at all on sound quality for this instrument. It boasts a powerful, clear, and precise sound. Its 2-way speaker system has separate woofers and tweeters for more lifelike voices. Yamaha guarantees that all of their brand keyboards are true stereo. Bass Boost, Advanced Wave Memory (AWM), and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) are all incorporated into the YPG-235 sound system to create an enhanced and realistic sound experience. Yamaha also provides you with the next level of sound control with 5 different master equalizer (EQ) settings.
Yamaha Education Suite is a tool that no piano student should pass up. I had already been taking piano lessons for over five years when I got my hands on a Yamaha keyboard with the Education Suite. Even though I had a great piano teacher, the Education Suite play-along lessons, the grading feature, and especially the chord dictionary helped me in many areas; from ear training, to sight reading, to becoming comfortable with different chord formations. The 30 built-in songs (and 70 more in the included CD-ROM) and different lesson modes make practicing piano fun and constructive. A metronome is also built in to the YPG-235.
Even though this portable piano is such a great tool for beginners, I doubt that more seasoned players will get bored with it very quickly. The depth of features on the YPG-235 is truly inexhaustible. There are 489 Voices (116 regular voices + 361 XGlite voices + 12 Drum/SFX Kits), 150 styles (with auto-accompaniment function - very fun), and 18 effects, including reverb, chorus, harmony and transpose. A pitch bend wheel is also included to add some extra spice. One feature I can never get enough of with Yamaha keyboards is the 6-track sequencer. It's a great thing to play around with all the features I've mentioned - the voices, the dual voice layering, splitting, harmonies and other effects - find just the right sound, and record your own creation. With 6-tracks you can compose some pretty complex pieces of music. The keyboard has a Flash ROM memory, and can be connected to a computer through USB, widening your creative possibilities. It's fun to pretend to be Hans Zimmer for a couple hours with a Yamaha equipped with these recording and MIDI features.
The YPG-235 has a 32 Note Polyphony and 16 Part Multi Timbrel which should keep you from dropping notes and sounds. Polyphony is the number of notes that can be held at once. 32 is typically enough for most people. The only time it gets tricky is when you have a very dense legato passage where you are trying to sustain more than 32 notes at a time. What happens then is the keyboard will drop some notes in order to keep others sounding. The 16 Part Multi Timbrel is a very important feature on keyboards with multi-track recording capabilities, since you need to be able to layer many voices on top of each other.
Here is a quick rundown of some other YPG-235 features:
-back-lit 92mm x 42mm custom LCD
-sustain pedal jack
-headphone jack (great for private practicing)
-music rest
The Yamaha YPG-235 is very portable. It weighs in at only 8.3kg (18 lbs. 5 oz). Its dimensions are (W x H x D) 46-3/8" x 5-3/8" x 16-1/4". It comes a nice silver color called Champagne Gold. This portable keyboard would be the perfect instrument to have in college or in an apartment where there is simply no room for an acoustic or larger digital piano, or simply for the piano player who can't put down the thousands of dollars that a "real" piano would cost.
The Yamaha YPG-235 76-Key Portable Grand Piano has been around since 2008, and is still a bestseller. It is the perfect combination of functionality, sound quality, and plain fun.
Other Yamaha YPG Models/Packs: