Yamaha PSR-E473 Electric Keyboard

Description

🎹 Yamaha PSR-E473 Electric Keyboard — Advanced Features for Aspiring Musicians

Key Features of the Yamaha PSR-E473 Electric Keyboard ✅

• 61 Full-Size Touch-Sensitive Keys: Experience a responsive playing feel with keys that adjust to your touch, providing a dynamic and expressive performance.

• 820 High-Quality Voices: Access a wide variety of instrument sounds, including Super Articulation Lite voices that capture the nuances of real instruments.

• 290 Accompaniment Styles: Play along with a diverse range of musical genres, from classical to contemporary, with automatic accompaniment that adapts to your chords.

• Dual 6W Speakers with Mega Boost: Enjoy clear and powerful sound, with the ability to amplify your performance by 6dB for larger venues or outdoor settings.

• Assignable Live Control Knobs and Pitch Bend Wheel: Manipulate effects and parameters in real-time, adding expressive control to your performance.

• Motion Effect Button: Apply filter, pitch, and modulation effects instantly, enhancing your sound with creative effects.

• Quick Sampling Function: Record and play back your own sounds, integrating them seamlessly into your performance.

• USB Audio/MIDI Interface: Connect to your computer or mobile device for recording, editing, and music production applications.

• 1/4″ Microphone Input with Vocal Effects: Sing along and apply DSP effects to your voice, adding depth and texture to your performance.

My review

When you pay between £200-£300 for a keyboard you expect to see a lot of features and good quality sound. There are much cheaper options out there, but I feel that the PSR-E473 is for the more serious player. Sure, this could be classed as a ‘beginner’ keyboard, but because you can do so much with this it falls into the advanced players territory nicely too. Let’s take a look at the Yamaha PSR-E473 and see what I thought! Starting with the standard piano sound, the Yamaha got off to a good start. It’s a little on the bright side, but then most keyboards are. For a more authentic and rich piano sound you would need to spend a lot more on a digital piano. But the PSR-E473 isn’t going to shock you with its amazing piano sound because it has another 820 voices to handle.

With so many different instruments to choose from you will have a hard time trying to get through them all—as did I! I tried my best to play through some of the really popular sounds, like the strings, organs, guitars, brass, and so on—and I was very impressed. Some of them fall a little flat, but that’s always to be expected when you pay so little for a quality keyboard like this. There are some fantastic little details that Yamaha have injected into this keyboard. Take the saxophone voice for example—you can hear the breath of the player! Overall I was really impressed that the PSR-E473 was able to hold so many voices and do a good job of making them sound relatively authentic. The speakers on a keyboard are always small, and there’s no exception here. To keep things lightweight and portable you have to cut costs in certain areas, but the speakers still did a good job. The quality of the sound didn’t distort at high levels and everything was in order here. With so many 290 accompaniment styles to also choose from I had a lot of fun playing a few popular songs, much to the annoyance or hopefully joy of everyone else in the keyboard shop! So the sound is good and I would certainly recommend this to a beginner or even advanced player. To hear how the PSR-E473 sounds, here’s a great demonstration.

Touch and Feel

It’s quite rare to find a keyboard at this price that has touch-sensitive keys. This means they play louder when you hit them harder. A very nice feature indeed which I would always recommend to anyone looking for a keyboard. The keys were very nice to play, and although they are not weighted (which is to be expected), they felt a little softer underneath the fingers. They were quite springy, and the touch sensitivity worked very well.

Features

Have I already mentioned that there are 820 voices on the PSR-E473? It’s certainly worth revisiting this feature because it sells it for me. It’s such a huge amount of instruments to perform with, and although you may not even use half of them it’s nice to see that Yamaha are trying to give you as much for your money as possible. Another stand-out feature of the PSR-E473 is its built-in play-along and learning functions. This allows you to practice songs and the keyboard will help you follow along. There are lots of additional tools for learning, and all of them are proven to work. I can easily see how looking at the notes on the keyboard’s screen whilst playing along would help someone to quickly get used to the keys—an awesome feature!

Price and Summary

I would highly recommend this keyboard and Yamaha have certainly done it again! The price at the time of writing this review is around £299. A very modest price indeed for the amount of features that are packed into this keyboard. This kind of price allows anyone to begin playing and to take advantage of the in-built learning tools. It’s the perfect keyboard for a beginner, but someone advanced would also be able to show off their talents on this as well!