Buying a portable keyboard can provide you with outstanding value for your money, and offer an extremely wide range of high-quality sounds and features for beginners or even the more advanced and experienced keyboard player. Yamaha introduced the portable keyboard in 1980, and since that time they have become one of the top-selling musical instruments in our history. Yamaha keyboards, as well as other keyboard brands are used extensively in education and are widely recognized as being the perfect introduction into the music world. Portable keyboards have exceptional depth as well as the unique ability to manipulate and create a wide variety of sounds. Portable keyboards have crossed most all musical genres of our day, from rock to jazz, rhythm and blues, reggae, pop, and even country music. There are many brands of portable keyboards; two of the top sellers which offer exceptional quality include Yamaha and Roland.

Yamaha Portable Keyboard
Yamaha Pro Audio manufactures keyboards which come from their musical instrument division which is headquartered in Hamamatsu, Japan. Yamaha is a premier leader in the world of portable keyboards, offering a truly impressive lineup of keyboards for beginners to professional musicians. The Piaggero line is a particularly lightweight keyboard which features Yamaha’s signature “Intelligent Arpegiator” Technology, and comes with 500 voice, 160 styles, and a USB to device port. Yamaha’s 61-key YPT-320 portable electronic keyboard is equipped with 482 natural sound voices and the YPG-235 is a very inexpensive portable keyboard with over 400 sounds as well.

Roland Portable Keyboards
Roland brand keyboards come from the Roland Corporation, headquartered also in Hamamatsu, Japan. As of 2010, Roland produces thousands of digital piano models and accessories. Roland’s A-37 features a 76-note controller, with 2 zones and MIDI Outs mp3 player input, audio sampling and an USB MIDI Interface, while their DP990  was designed for both professional musicians as well as amateurs just starting their musical career. The affordable F-110 has a 3-pedal unit embedded in the music stand and 88 fully weighted keys with a collection of very high-quality sounds.

Components of the Portable Keyboard
The major components of the portable electronic keyboard include a musical keyboard, which is the traditional black and white piano keys, pressed by the player which connects the switches and triggers the electronic note. The majority of portable keyboards use a keyboard matrix circuit to reduce the amount of wiring needed. Most portable keyboards will contain user interface software in the form of a program which handles the user interaction through control keys and menus. This software can allow your portable keyboard to sound like a piano, organ, flute or drum, and offers special effects such as reverb, echo, delay or sustain. Modern-day keyboards contain rhythm and chord generators, which produce different versions of rhythms and chords through MIDI electronic commands, and sound generators which accept MIDI commands. Amplifiers and speakers are another component of portable keyboards, as well as auto accompaniment featured on certain models.

Portable keyboards can be found extensively, with a wide-range of prices and features. There are quite costly ones available with every single feature imaginable as well as less expensive ones which still come with a fairly wide range of features. Some of the more popular portable keyboards are self-contained, with amplifier and speakers built in. Casio offers lower-end fairly inexpensive instruments, while the more professional line will come from Yamaha, Roland, Korg and Kurzweil.

Find Your Perfect Portable Keyboard at Piano Gallery Direct
Piano Gallery Direct has several locations in the Western United States; because of our incredible dedication to our customer’s complete satisfaction, our popularity has grown by leaps and bounds. Look through our website, then either give us a call at 1-800-600-9710 or shoot us an e-mail to support@pianogallery.com. We look forward to helping you purchase your portable keyboard.