Kind of a Fun Morning - In a Musical Sort of Way...

I have talked about my beloved Yamaha keyboard (a PSR-9000Pro) ad nauseum, I know. And we also have my mom's little Yamaha keyboard - a YPT-20 - here. I've loved using mine at church, but it is a bear to move back and forth. It's heavy and large and awkward and I'm always afraid of damaging it going up and down steps, in spite of Pete's brilliant carrier he made out of a hand truck, foam pipe insulation, and duct tape...so I have started taking my mom's keyboard on Sunday mornings.

However it is so unsatisfying! I like using the instruments and rhythms (or, voices and styles in Yamaha-speak), although the styles were more of an issue than they were worth, it turns out, and didn't allow me to follow the song leader's changes in tempo. But still...

We also have here a little 10-year-old Radio Shack keyboard - MD-981 - that we'd gotten several years ago for $15 from someone who was cleaning out her closets. No power supply or music stand was included, but I thought it might be something fun for my daughter to use so we bought a power supply at the time. While Casey lost interest after a short while, I'm keeping it for a friend who'd like it once she moves to our area. In the meantime, however, we had misplace the power supply for it (in fact we couldn't even find the keyboard itself for quite a while!), so it just sat.

This morning Pete happened to find the power supply while looking for something else. What fun! Of course there is NO comparison to the Yamaha in sound quality, in the same way that there's no comparison between eating hay or prime rib. But it has quite a few different instrument sounds on it, they are at least identifiable, and the good folk at our small country church aren't musical snobs - in fact quite the opposite.

So we hooked it up to some nice speakers this morning and lo and behold, not bad! There's an output jack for the speakers at church, one for a sustain pedal, and we have a portable music stand that I can set up behind it, so I think all systems are go. It's very light-weight (8#) too.

Meanwhile, my Petey has wanted to learn some keyboard basics. Between some beginner books and some YouTube videos (he doesn't seem to want my help) and this keyboard, he'll have something to play with and learn. (He already plays his Suzuki QChord - an amazing little MIDI device!)

I was thinking about getting a more portable Yammy this summer anyway, but this might just fill the bill until then, and in the meantime Pete can have lots of fun with it :).