Yamaha Music Finder Database

Summary: Yamaha has finally come up with a tool to organise title-related style settings. It is a great tool; something you will love, once set-up for your purpose. Mind you, it comes (in case of the Tyros 2) with more than 1,800 titles out of the box.

It was on the first day of owning the Yamaha Tyros 2 that I pressed this great shiny button named "Music Finder". Up came a long list of strange sounding titles (I will get to the "strange" later).

In essence, the Music Finder is a little database, storing records containing (on the "All" tab):

1. Music Title
2. Style
3. Time Signature, and
4. Tempo

When you find and select your song title of choice, the Music Finder instantly sets up the keyboard for you to play this song. Simply press a key and the appropriate (in the record specified) accompaniment style will play at just the (defined) tempo for that song.

What a grand tool! If you are new to the idea of a Music Finder it may not make much sense. Once you think about it and what you could do with it, you will figure the Music Finder is a necessity for easy style access and configuration.

The Music Finder has 4 tabs (screen pages):

1. All will display the whole list of up to 2,500 records, which can be quickly gone through via the "Data Entry" dial
2. Favourite will display the list of titles you have added to the favourite list. This is not a second set of records, but rather a filter on the list under the "All" tab
3. Search 1 is a screen allowing to search on all columns of the list
4. Search 2 is a screen allowing to search on all columns of the list

The Music Finder contents is also used for the "Repertoire" button. This function will look-up the Music Finder records showing only the records associated with the current selected style.

The Funny Title Names in the Music Finder

At first glance the Music Finder seemed to list titles completely unbeknown to me. At a second glance the odd title translated into something useful. For example: "A Bridge to Cross Troubled Water" transformed in my mind to "Bridge over troubled Water". I said to myself: What kind of clown would create entries like this? I did a bit of research on the Internet and could only find complaints about the silly titles, but no answer why this is so. My explanation is "copyright". To avoid any proable legal tantrums with publishers, Yamaha must have decided to describe the titles rather than listing original titles. You may think of a better explanation.  The fact is, these b!oody titles need to change in order to make sense.

Further research on the Internet revealed the odd translated Music Finder files, but none matched the current set I have got in the Yamaha Tyros 2.

Jan 31, 2007: I have — in the meantime — enlisted the help of the jolly group found on the  PSR Tutorial MusicFinder Forum. I had some 600 titles left to decipher; they all got together and solved this puzzle of obscured titles, and left only 22 to do. Thank you kindly fellows!
To crack the final lot I enlisted the help of the  Yamaha Personal Keyboard Owner Forum… 7 left to do.

The Idea What to Do With the Music Finder

I reminisced for while — after depressing the Music Finder button described above — thinking of what this tool could do for me, when a huge light bulb went on.

My wife is playing keyboard for more than ten years now. She has a number of score and fake books that stack up to one metre in height… anyway, she made notes about style and tempo selected to play some of the songs. I thought wouldn't this be great if I could add all songs we have to a database and generate Music Finder databases from it?!

Update

Feb 26, 2008: The database design and normalisation is done. Now working on data load and web interface.

Jan 31, 2008: I have now the data of over 50 fakebooks with their song titles. These will be linked with the relevant MusicFinder titles in the near future.

Visitor's Comments

Entries are shown in the order of latest first.

Author Date / Time	Comment
MaxG from Brisbane wrote on Saturday, February 27, 2010 10:20	Well, I would love to complete the MusicFinder database. Nevertheless, I have to admit; life is short and I have other priorities right now. Motorcycling is number one, trip around Australia number 2, learning to play piano number 3… I have almost given up programming; meaning — as I see it right now — I may never complete this project. Sorry.
Ian Petersen from Cape Town wrote on Tuesday, January 05, 2010 23:24	Thanks for all the excellent information / advice regarding Yamaha keyboards. What is the status of your "fake-book-specific MusicFinder database"? And if it is completed; how can I access it? Thanks, Ian South Africa