Yamaha YPG-535

January 14, 2020

Yamaha YPG-535 Digital Piano

The Yamaha YPG-535 digital piano as we know it today has evolved over the years and has become an instrument to have when you are looking to learn or sharpen your piano playing skills. Several manufacturers make digital pianos as they have continued to grow in popularity. This is mostly because of the great features you get with digital pianos. they are hybrids that include a cross-section of the best features of the piano. They are made to emulate the traditional piano as much as possible, without having stresses such as tuning it regularly.

You can learn to play on any piano, however, there are benefits of learning to do so on a digital piano. The piano has a unique ability to create music that is inspiring and moving and this has made a lot of people take it up and also encourage their children to take up piano playing. The digital piano is great for beginners. It offers great tones and sounds that will also help train the student.

Digital pianos incorporate high-level digital sound technology and strategically positioned speakers to produce convincing acoustic piano sound, instead of using physical hammers and strings. They have a great tone and you can easily control the volume. The other great thing about the digital piano is that it negates the need for regular and often costly maintenance which is necessary with acoustic pianos.

Digital pianos also have precision weighted keys to recreate the feel and sound of an acoustic piano and yet still maintain the advantage of giving you the option to choose from different sounds. These sounds also include grand pianos and also non-piano sounds. You can also get to practice in peace because digital pianos allow you to plug in headphones. This will not only benefit you but everyone within earshot as well! You can make all the mistakes you want to make knowing that no one can hear you.

When it comes to the sounds that come with your digital piano, you can even create your sounds, and this makes this piano an asset for recording yourself. In this article, we take a look at the Yamaha YPG-535 Digital Piano. It comes with all the bells and whistles that you expect from a digital piano and more.

General Overview

The Yamaha Portable Grand YPG-535 has an easy to use panel, 88 Keys, Graded Soft Touch (GST) action with different levels of resistance. USB connectivity brings music directly to your keyboard with 2 ports on the back, USB TO HOST and USB TO DEVICE. Plus USB MIDI, Sustain Pedal jack and a Headphone jack for private practice. It displays the score to a song with lyric, chord and notation display. It has a performance Assistant Technology that features melody mode in addition to Chord and Chord/Free Model. The YPG-535 has 30 built-in songs plus 70 more on included CD-ROM for you to learn to play using the Yamaha Education Suite. The kit Includes a Yamaha YPG-535 88-Key Digital Piano w/ Knox Adjustable X Style bench & Full-Size Studio Headphones.

Yamaha’s portable grand comes with built-in songs plus 70 more on an included CD-ROM and an interactive lesson system, divided into left and right-hand parts, for learning them. You also can connect to a computer via USB, download more songs from the Internet into the internal Flash ROM and use all of the Yamaha Education Suite features to help you learn to play them. This piano offers a variety of styles and voices that are sure to come in handy. If you are looking to learn piano, or to sharpen your skills without spending an arm and a leg, then the Yamaha digital piano range may be what you need.

Yamaha has gone the extra mile by including an education suite which will teach you to play by breaking down songs into individual components like pitch and rhythm and also reconstructing them once they are mastered. You can practice one hand of a song alone while the instrument plays along with the other. The “waiting” mode, allows you to pause the accompaniment until you get to play the notes on the display. Another function you will find on the piano is “Tempo”. This function will play and adjust the tempo according to how accurate you are. Minus One mode lets you play the piano part start-to-finish, and gives you a grade at the end. This way you can gauge how well you are progressing and if there is anything you need to improve on. The ability to plug your headphones in makes this entire experience more pleasurable for you and those around you.

User Experience

This instrument comes highly recommended by several different users, especially if it is for a beginner and if space is an issue for you. Users in small apartments or homes, or who would need to travel with the instrument, said they found its portable size quite handy and easy to work with. Several users also say they found it sounds and feels a lot like a real piano. This is a big advantage and the main reason why the digital piano has become such a favorite. It sounds great and several users are happy with this feature. Some users even suggest this piano as a healthy way to get the kids off their devices and onto a hobby that can infuse culture like piano playing. They will not get bored too fast thanks to the many sounds it has and the great sound and quality thereof.

Available Options

You should start by noting that this is a product that has now been discontinued by the manufacturer. This is not to say that there is anything particularly wrong with this possible grand piano. However, you will not be able to purchase it directly from Yamaha themselves. Having said that, there are several suppliers on the market that still have this product in willing to let go of it. When you do go on the manufacturer’s website you will find that you can still register the product which is a great sign. It tells you that they still honour the warranty and provide you with good customer support if you were to require it.

Key Features

This is marketed and sold as a graded soft-touch keyboard. It is packed with a range of features that would provide you with the sort of versatility that you are used to getting from a keyboard while delivering the sort of true sound that comes only from the grand piano. What a few features that we like one of them is the easy song arrangement a feature. This allows you as the name suggests to work on the range with your song with great aplomb and ease.

You can pay this with the performance assistant technology which is good to enhance the ease at which you take on a live audience. There is also a USB connection which you can use to store away songs and play them back. For those who like to warp their sound a bit. You will take great pleasure from the pitch bend wheel. Yamaha describes it as being able to add a smooth pitch variation to the notes that you play.

Sounds

It’s a wide range of sounds that you could play using this keyboard. The first of course is the grand piano which is the natural sound of this device or instrument. Perhaps his greatest capability comes as a direct result of being able to connect to its midi functionality. With the media functionality there is no telling just how many of the instruments or sound you be able to produce using your grand piano. Without connecting anything there is quite a range that you can tap into anyway. These include most of the most common instruments that you could think of.

Most users may initially take for granted how difficult it can be to produce the perfect sound using your keyboard to play other instruments. If you are an experienced player this will not be the case for you. An instrument that’s undoubtedly taken more precedence over all others in the creation of this instrument is the drum.

Perhaps the vocals are not too far behind in this race. They are there is actually a drum kit list in the module which will tell you just how many of these drugs you can expect to find when using the keyboard. It will also give you some direction as to how to make the most of them. This is the same for the voice. There is a list called a voice list which will tell you what are the voices to expect to find on your keyboard. There isn’t much that goes into how you can make use of his voice. The good thing is that musicians are by definition creatives. It shouldn’t take you much to figure out what you can do these voices.

Connectivity

There is a wide range of ways that you could connect your grand piano to other devices. On the rear end of this device is a USB port and a sustain port. You can use the USB port to connect your keyboard to a personal computer. This can be done by plugging in a cable that is shaped like the ones that we use on printers and unplugging and plugging the other end into your computer’s USB port. To successfully connected to you need to install the drivers on your computer. This is what allows the computer to recognise your keyboard. Disconnection type is known as the USB to host connection. This is the same connection that you can use to transfer your performances another data from your keyboard to your computer.

Why are you on PC mode are you can also make use of the MIDI function of the keyboard. This allows you to control external devices and sound using the keyboard. Most producers would use this as a way to feed sound into production software such as fruity loops.

The PC mode can be toggled on and off as you please. You will find that the manual mentions that you could control the media devices independent of the PC to mould that is on your keyboard. All of this is relatively simple to achieve if you follow the instructions that are provided to you in the manual.

Effects

They are quite a lot of effects on this grand piano. If you’re looking on the list that is usually on the top of your keyboard you would find that all the sins effects are between numbers 378 to 412. These include rain, African wind, popcorn, tiny bells, atmosphere, night, echoes and sci-fi to name but a few. If you’re interested in the XG sound effects they come between 452 and number 500. These ones include fire fireworks, siren, starship, explosion, machine-gun, dog, gunshot, applause, helicopter, showers, phone calls and so on. The list can be quite extensive. How you make use of these will be left to your creative ability.

Accessories

Depending on where you buy this piano, the accessories that are usually included are:

Music rest
Accessory CD-Rom
The Owner’s Manual
A Keyboard Stand
A foot Switch
An AC Power Adaptor

The CD that comes with your piano is packed with applications that will be of use to you. These applications include the following:

Musicsoft Downloader
Digital Music Notebook
Flash Demo
Song Book
USB-MIDI Driver
USB-MIDI Driver
MIDI 70 songs
5 style files
5 music database files

Let’s go through all of these to give you an overview of what to expect. The Musicsoft Downloader is an application that you can use to download many songs from the Internet onto your computer and finally onto the keyboard. The digital music notebook designed to haunt your budding music skills by combining online music learning programs. It brings some very popular songs with it.

The digital music notebook/demo is designed to give you food reduction of what the digital music notebook is about.

The songbook comes with face songs already installed in it and about 17 midi songs on the CD ROM you can use this to practice and improve your playing skills.

The USB midi drivers that come with this I designed for an older version of Windows. In most cases you find that they still work on the latest versions of Windows. I have yet to come across a case where someone is struggling with the drivers for their computer. These are the ones that would allow you to connect your keyboard to your computer and have it recognised.

There is quite a lot of simple data on the keyboard it includes music databases, midi songs and various instruments.

Verdict

The Yamaha YPG-535 digital piano, is a great buy for several reasons. This includes portability and being able to travel with it. This digital piano is a typical hybrid, a cross between an acoustic and electric piano. It delivers the best of both worlds. All you need to do to get the most realistic piano sound is push a button, and it is that easy. The portable grand button resets the entire piano to a stereo sampled piano, this makes it great for when its time to practice. Yamaha is well known for its high-quality acoustic pianos. Features such as meticulous attention to detail, make it stand out from the crowd

We have taken an in-depth look at what Yamaha offers in the way of its Yamaha YPG-535 digital piano. We hope this helps you make the best decision to suit your music hobby or career. Happy shopping!

Be sure to be check out our post on Yamaha Portable Grand DGX-230