TYROS

Take an interactive tour of the Tyros. Listen to the stunning sounds and talking demonstrations. Click here. (Requires Macromedia Flash 5 plugin and computer sound).

Yamaha has taken some of the innovative concepts and features of its Clavinova®, Synthesizer, Pro Audio and Portable Keyboard line, added a brand new technology called Mega Voice®, and put it all together in a futuristic keyboard called TYROS. It's groundbreaking, it's exciting, it's cutting edge and it just may be the finest keyboard you have ever heard, seen or played. It combines the quality of sound, stylistic detail and ease of use of a Clavinova digital piano, incredible editing control over sounds and sequences like our professional Motif® synthesizers, built-in mixer technology and DSP effects from our world-renowned Pro Audio experience, and the ability to carry it under one arm from our Portable Keyboard Department – it weighs in at a mere 27 pounds.

TYROS is the first keyboard from Yamaha to include a brand new technology called Mega Voice. So, what is Mega Voice? Most digital keyboards create their sound from recording or sampling instruments and when you press the keys, you're playing back the sample. Previous to Mega Voice Technology, in traditional sampling, an instrument's pitch was recorded at different increments (C C# D D# etc.) and that was about it. Unfortunately, that leaves out a lot of the subtle nuances that make an instrument sound unique. For example, on a guitar, traditional sampling would miss the string and pick noise. Yamaha Mega Voice technology provides open and mute string sounds, dead notes, hammering effects, slide effects, harmonics and a wide range of strum and body noises – putting back the missing elements that take a sampled guitar from sounding like a guitar played on a keyboard to a Mega Voice sampled guitar that sounds like, dare we say, a guitar!

Once you hear the difference, you'll never want to go back. In technical terms, Mega Voice duplicates an instrument's behavior. In sonic terms, this gives TYROS stunningly realistic sounds.

A keyboard's most important feature is its sound. More Wave ROM (that's where the voices are stored) usually translates to better sound. TYROS has an outstanding 96MB of Wave ROM packed with some of the finest voices you have ever heard – over 1100 voices in all. You'll find many new Live!, Cool and Sweet voices and 36 Drum Kits in addition to the new Mega Voice sounds. The Organ Flutes on TYROS use Modeling Technology introduced on the 9000PRO – a whopping 91 independently oscillating voices to simulate the rotating tone generation wheels found in classic organs. And now, with the color screen, all of the functions like realtime virtual drawbars and rotary speaker switches are photo-quality representations of the originals. You won't believe your ears – or your eyes.

Of course, no professional Yamaha digital workstation would be complete without a full complement of XG voices and with TYROS you can be assured that XG and General MIDI sequences will sound their absolute best. In fact, TYROS is fully XG, GM and GM2 compatible.

The 300 musical Styles found in this digital workstation are best described as having a backup band at your fingertips. Choose a category of music (like Rock, Country or R&B), select a Style from the menu and play your favorite song. It's that easy. Each Style has up to 8 different musical parts that provide drums, bass, guitar, horns, strings and any other musical instrument that suits the genre of music you have selected. TYROS also features many different types of Accompaniment Styles. Pro-styles provide professional and exciting arrangements combined with perfect playability. Session-styles automatically enrich the player's chords with additional color notes or even harmonic progressions. Basic-styles cover a wide range of music while the arrangement is kept basic and generic, and therefore extremely versatile.

In addition to the many different chording techniques provided on previous Yamaha keyboards, TYROS also includes an AI (Artificial Intelligence) mode in both dedicated left hand mode and full keyboard mode. For example, in left hand mode, you can play chords using 2 notes and TYROS will select the correct chord, based on the previous chord, allowing you to do descending bass lines without switching to "On Bass" mode.

Yamaha has always had great Styles, but with TYROS, they are taken to new heights of realism because of the Mega Voice Technology. An example is the new Unplugged Styles. Because the Unplugged Styles are guitar-focused, a major amount of time and effort was dedicated to making sure that these Styles "voice" like a guitar would, on both regular and extended chords. For the ultimate realism, the guitar parts in these Styles were actually played (and programmed) by an LA session musician using a Yamaha Pacifica Guitar with a G50 MIDI converter! You can rest assured that our Global Style Programmers take all of the work out of making realistic band tracks that you can use for live performance, studio work, song writing and MIDI file creation. With TYROS, just do what you do best – sit back and play.

Looking for musical Styles for your local church choir? TYROS has you covered with many new additions to our gospel section. They're so good, you'll want to get on your feet and clap along. How about jazz? One of the goals of the U.S. part of the Global Style Team was to incorporate some Styles that would work for hobby and gigging musicians that like to play jazz. The goal was to make it so you can grab your favorite fake book, sit down, select a jazz style and play. Great detail was spent on the walking bass and guitar parts, making sure that they voice correctly for extended chords (like 13s, sharp and flat 9s and sharp 11 chords). When you get your hands on a TYROS, try the Slow, Moderate and Fast Jazz styles and the Slow and Moderate Jazz Waltz styles. They really swing!

This same team of programmers also decided to apply their musical knowledge and expertise to some of the R&B and Latin styles in TYROS. When you combine this extraordinary programming ability with the tremendous sounds in the keyboard, you can't help but make good music. You can use the built in Styles, play Styles directly from floppy disk or optional hard drive, purchase Styles at http://www.yamahamusicsoft.com, search the Internet for Yamaha Styles that other customers have created, or create your own. And TYROS is backward compatible with Styles created for other Yamaha products.

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

TYROS is equipped with a professional Vocal Harmony function, which transposes your voice in realtime, allowing you to back up your singing performance with stunning 4-part harmony (including your original voice). In addition to ambient reverbs and lush choruses, a vast selection of dedicated vocal effects are provided, including insertion effects, noise gate, compressor and 3-band EQ. When using disks with lyric information, TYROS will display the lyrics in the color VGA screen as well as output the lyric information to an external TV monitor. New features in TYROS allow the user to disable all screens the audience sees except the lyric screen – no more distractions while you setup the keyboard for the next song.

In addition to the other Score features above, TYROS has some unbelievable features for people looking to have the keyboard help them along a little. CueTime is music (MIDI files) that actually follows you. It speeds up, slows down and will even stop and wait for you to find the next note. It's like having a built-in tutor. Vocal CueTime takes the technology a step further – the keyboard actually follows your singing! Using Vocal CueTime disks or any MIDI files that include the melody (for example: Tune1000®), you simply sing along to your favorite songs by following the bouncing ball as the lyrics advance. If the song file contains harmony information, the keyboard will add harmony in appropriate places. It will also stop and wait for you to sing the next note. But here's the really fascinating part – you don't even have to play the keyboard. Just sing. The keyboard "listens" to you as you sing and advances the music as you sing the notes. Simply amazing!

Yamaha has long been a world leader in digital signal processing technology. In fact, Yamaha professional audio products are found in most professional recording studios around the world. TYROS takes full advantage of this know-how, giving you an extensive range of top-quality digital effects, including 34 reverb types, 26 chorus types and five blocks of 183 insertion effects ranging from spacious delays to cutting edge distortion. Also provided are combination effects and an amazingly realistic rotary speaker effect. In total, TYROS is capable of producing 12 simultaneous DSP effects!

The USB connector on TYROS opens up the keyboard to computer connectivity. Now, when you want to name songs and directories, simply connect to your computer, and edit directories and files to your hearts content. You can copy, delete and move files between various storage devices (Flash ROM, floppy disk drive, optional hard drive) and your computer and organize your data into directories. Yamaha also includes a voice-editing software program that allows you to edit the internal voices in TYROS from your computer using a graphical interface. In addition, you can open your favorite computer music-sequencing program and the TYROS USB will act as a MIDI interface providing 32 channels of MIDI. TYROS is also equipped with MIDI A/B In & Out ports.

Polyphony, the number of notes a keyboard is capable of playing simultaneously, is like the horsepower of a car – the more there is, the more power you have. As stated earlier, the TYROS digital workstation is capable of 32 channels of MIDI over USB. You are also able to layer 3 voices in the right hand in addition to a separate left hand voice while the MIDI channels are playing back (that's 36 simultaneous tracks) or when the Style engine is turned on. With this kind of capability, even the conventional 64 notes of polyphony featured on most other music workstations can run out quickly. TYROS features 128 notes of polyphony, freeing you up to add those musical tracks without having to worry about note dropout.

The onboard sequencer provides a large recording capacity of 35,000 notes. Four record modes are available: Quick Record mode for easy and convenient recording with dedicated buttons on the panel; Multi-track Record mode for independent recording and editing of up to 16 tracks; Step Record mode for accurate recording and event-level editing; and Chord Step Record mode for precise recording of chord progressions and pattern variations. In addition, TYROS introduces a new feature to Yamaha keyboards called Song Position Pointer. This feature allows you to mark sections of a MIDI file that TYROS will either return to when you press a button or loop between. Very handy for live players when they want to repeat the last chorus of a song a few times because they have a full dance floor.

The TYROS operating system (built-in software that gives the keyboard its functions) is stored completely in flash memory, which means that updating the keyboard with the latest OS version is as easy as downloading it from Yamaha's Portable Keyboard Website: http://www.yamahapkclub.com

TYROS is compatible with the large selection of PSR-9000 and 9000PRO software available on the market. And if you happen to be upgrading from these keyboards, you'll be able to import most of your old data, including Registration Memory settings, Custom Styles, Multi Pad settings and Custom Voices* made from sampled waveforms.