Voices for my PSR-S710

[Tom S]

Hi, I recently found that Yamaha has expansion packs. I was particularly interested in the Church Organ pack, however, Yamaha "says" the packs are not available for the S-710. Does anyone know if the file type would actually be usable in the S-710? I really like the organ tutti!! Very powerful. I have downloaded some of the organ voices available on PSRT, however still searching for the right ones. I know the Tyros 5 has an incredible organ array. I'm wondering if someone could direct me to those Tyros voices if they would work on the S-710? Sorry, lots of questions all at once. Thanks, TOM

[Joe H]

Tom,

Sorry, the S710 does NOT support expansion packs.  The first keyboards to support expansion packs are the S750/S950.  But those models only allow 1 pack to loaded at a time.  The newer S770/ S970 allow more than 1 pack at a time to be installed by using the software: Yamaha Expansion Manager (YEM)

Joe H

[panos]

Hi Tom,I am a little hesitant about how voices from other keyboards will really sound on my psr.
With styles I  just need the patterns and then I can revoice and equalize them so they won't sound bad.
The styles will not sound as good as on a Tyros 3-4-5-Genos-s9xx but of course if something could reproduced the same way from one keyboard to another we wouldn't spend our money for better and more expencive keyboards.
Voices as far as I can understand are samples and for being able a keyboard to "play" a sample correctly must have the appropriate program to do so.
You will see in yamaha musicsoft that before you download a package it is important to choose your model first,otherwise you will download voices that have made for another model,to play to another program and will sound bad to your keyboard.
So I believe every newer keyboard have its own new program to reproduce better the sounds than the previous model.
For older models I think is better to try to reproduce the sounds we want using our ears and combining voices to get to a result that we may like.
I know it is not an easy task that's why people are buying packages from other sites also that they don't really sell new sample sounds,they just do that combining/editing/equalizing on behalf of the users.

[chongjasmine]

It is sad that Yamaha does not offer every expansion pack for every available model.
But that is life.
Hope you find a good alternative to what you want.

[Joe H]

I upgraded from an S910 which does not support expansion packs to an S970 which does support expansion packs.  This required new hardware (chips) that have memory to hold the samples (sounds).

Now that I have the S970 I have bought new sounds for EDM because the S910 Preset Voices are not the right sounds for EDM... this is an important fact.  People in certain parts of the world have posted on this forum that Yamaha does not include authentic ethnic instrument sounds even for the expansion packs. 

What I am trying to say is having the right sounds for your kind of music is very important.  It makes a big difference in how the music sounds.  Just imagine trying to play classical music with synthesized orchestral instruments.  Example: a synthesized violin versus a sample of a real violin. Another example would playing rock and roll with a synthesized guitar.  It just doesn't sound as good... it might even sound fake.

I think Yamaha understood that if they wanted to capture the world market it would require a keyboard that could load any kind of (world)  ethnic or synth instrument sound.  That is not an easy task even for Yamaha so they created YEM so that 3rd party developers could create custom Voices to satisfy the world market. As big a company as Yamaha is... the company can not possibly do that on its own.

The problem has become that 3rd party developers do not have the compression schema that Yamaha does so the expansion packs are larger than Yamaha packs.  This is forcing Yamaha to increase the expansion pack memory each time they release a new keyboard.

Joe H