EZ150

The EZ-150 lighted keyboard from Yamaha will have you up and playing in no time. It’s simple. Call up a song from the 100 songs built in to the keyboard, select if you’d like to play the left or right hand part and hit “Start”. The keyboard will light up the key that you’re supposed to play. And to make it even less stressful, the song will actually stop and wait for you to find the correct key! All of the tools you need are found in the keyboard, including how to play chords. So read on and find out what the EZ-150 can do for you.

The EZ-150 comes with 100 built-in songs with Songbook. But if you've never played before, where do you start? Well, if learning to play music is important to you, the Yamaha Education Suite, a wonderful set of music training functions, makes learning music incredibly easy. Seven types of lessons are available as well as a convenient chord dictionary.

Playing piano is fast and easy with Yamaha's Portable Grand function. One dedicated button brings up a great sounding stereo-sampled piano, stunningly rich and authentic in its sound, as well as setting up the keyboard to play as a piano in full keyboard mode. On top of all this, a wealth of special piano-only "Pianist" styles, like Piano Ballad or Stride for example, provide professional-sounding piano accompaniment that changes chords automatically as you do, while you play a piano melody on top!

The EZ-150 has 100 voices for you to choose from. There are pianos, electric pianos, harpsichord, guitars, drums, bass, violins and brass. Pretty much every instrument in the orchestra is at your fingertips. And if you don’t know which sound goes with what style of music, the keyboard can select an appropriate sound for you using the convenient One-Touch Setting.

In addition to the 100 songs found in the EZ-150, there are 100 styles that allow you to play any song you like. It's just like having a built-in band. Call up your favorite style of music like Rock, Big Band or Country, press a chord or play Single Finger mode, and the 150 will follow you through a piece of music, providing all of the drums, bass, piano, guitar, horn and string parts for you. With this instrument, you can make great sounding music with little more than 2 fingers, however as you learn to play, the EZ-150 will adapt to your new skills and automatically switch between single finger mode and fingered mode where you play all the notes of the chord.

For a demonstration of "What is a Style", click here (1.3MB download – requires Macromedia Flash and computer sound.)

Just above the keyboard on the right side are 4 Multi pad buttons that trigger musical phrases. There is a wide selection of musical phrases to choose from to embellish your music, including Pianist, Organ, Guitar, Percussion, Drums, DJ Drums, DJ, Techno and others. Play a chord on the keyboard, and the musical phrase will automatically match it. Once you try them, you’ll see why Yamaha keyboards can make playing music fun.

The EZ-150 has a special MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) port on the back that lets you connect your keyboard to a computer (requires an optional MIDI Interface like the Yamaha UX16 and music software). Once connected, you can play your songs into the computer, edit them if necessary, and e-mail them to your friends and family.

What's polyphony, you ask? Simply put, polyphony is how many notes a keyboard can reproduce simultaneously. The EZ-150 has 16-note Polyphony, which is adequate for most beginners.