Product Reviews & Consumer Advice

Yamaha YPT-220 61 Key Personal Keyboard with AC Adapter, Deluxe Keyboard Stand and Professional Headphones A great choice for beginners on the go, the 61-key Yamaha YPT-220 personal keyboard features 375 natural sounding voices–including Yamaha’s world-famous grand piano sound.

Yamaha EZ-200 61 Full-Sized Touch Sensitive Lighted Keyboard Bundle: Includes Professional Headphones, Keyboard Stand, and Power Supply The Yamaha EZ200 lighted keyboard is a great sounding, fun, easy way to learn how to play!Designed specifically for beginners, the EZ200 61 Key lighted keyboard from Yamaha will have you playing songs from the very first day.

Casio WK-200 76-Key Personal Keyboard Package with Stand, Headphones and Power Supply The Casio WK200 Personal Keyboard offers great tones, sampling, and lessons in one great keyboard! Casio is showing how much they can fit in to this keyboard while offering at a price that makes it impossible to turn down.

Many of the digital keyboard instruments by Yamaha and Casio include some sort of educational piano learning system that is supposed to help the aspiring piano player develop keyboard skills.  These actually are geared towards allowing one to learn the built-in songs and are typically found on the arranger style keyboards.  Here is my experience with these systems.

Yamaha offers the Yamaha Education Suite (Y.E.S.) which is a multi-level learning system that grades your progress.  There are several modes for learning including one that waits for you to press the right note before the music continues, another which plays the song at the speed of your playing, and one which allows you to play with just the right or left hand.  Casio offers a similar graded system on their keyboards called the Step-Up learning system.  The Casio system breaks the songs up into segments, and for each segment there is a mode for learning the left-hand or right-hand only, and then both hands.

Both the Casio and Yamaha music keyboards have information LCD screens which include hand icons that show which fingers should be used and a keyboard icon which will display the right keys that should be pressed.

I have personally owned both Yamaha and Casio arranger keyboards, which feature a collection of instrument voices (such as organs, strings, brass) and song styles (such as pop rock, country, reggae), and also had the education systems built-in.  I found that the screen was much to small to be helpful.  As a novice keyboard player it was hard for me to follow along with both the fingering displayed by the hand icons and the keys that needed to be pressed displayed by the keyboard icon all at the same time, even at a slow tempo.  I got a bit further along if I just followed the keyboard icon and intuited my own fingering.  Breaking up the lessons into left and right hand is always helpful when learning piano, so that functionality was helpful.

I have also had experience with the lighted key digital music keyboards, which both Yamaha and Casio make.  The lighted keys are, for me, easier to follow since they are bigger and easier to see, and thus seem to be a little better for learning the built-in songs.  Overall, the education systems can be somewhat helpful in getting familiar with the song chords, melody, and eventually, with enough practice, learning the song, but it seems fairly limiting to me, although others may have an easier time.

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