Musical Instruments & Technology

Ellen J. Barrier

Music Store

I enjoy listening to the sounds of many different musical instruments. I am a big fan of Jazz music. My family and I enjoy going to concerts. Many of my family members as well as myself, are into music. We play a variety of musical instruments. I'm going to talk about the instrument I play:

I play the keyboard.  It is a Yamaha Porta Tone. The things I appreciate about the keyboard is that - it allows the musician to play a variety of instruments: Piano, organ, drums, guitar and horns - along with a variety of sound effects. I could go on. But, I'll talk about my keyboard. If you play a musical instrument of any kind, I'm sure you deeply appreciate it. And the time you spend alone with your instrument. The musicians and their instruments become one.


Performance Assistance Technology

This feature is a easy way  to play piano and organ, on your keyboard. It is especially good for new players. It allows the student to play along with songs. The technology reads the chord data from the song, and assigns the appropriate notes to the keyboard, for the chords of the song that's being played. Different notes and chords are produced, even if the student plays the same note repeatedly. This is because, the chords of a song, changes constantly.

Performance assistance technology, can only be used with songs, that include chord data. The student can download songs from the Internet, if they are available - and use them with this technology, only if the required chord data is included. The student can also, change the song tempo. If the tempo of a song is too fast or too slow, set the tempo by touching the TEMPO/TAP button.