How do I get authentic sounds on my PSR e463?

[carlosh11934]

Hello to everyone and thank you for letting me partake in your forum web site! I live in North Padre Island near Corpus Christi, TX. I'm mainly a "by ear" player, but at my age, 74, that works well for me. Since I can't sing, I mainly do instrumentals, which brings me to my question.

I have a Yamaha PSR e463 and for most part, it meets my current needs. It is connected via midi to a laptop with Sonar X3. Let's take the song by Santo & Johnny, Sleepwalk. All 4 of my steel guitars on my list of internal instrument on my keyboard sound, well, cheesy, compared to the video of this gentleman playing it on his keyboard.

Video

Can someone point me in the right direction in which I should go to get better sounding instruments?

Carlos

 

[anotherscott]

I don't know whether your PSR has the guitar sound used in that Tyros 4 video (it might or might not), but the two most obvious "techniques" i see him using is that the sound uses velocity such that, when you strike a note with a lot of force, it glides up to the note, you may want to see if any of your guitar sounds have that attribute. Second, he's using aftertouch to introduce vibrato, which is very nice and very useful but not a feature that is available on lower cost models. Vibrato can also be introduced with the modulation wheel or foot pedal, but your board does not have those things either. Your board does have control knobs, though... it's possible that one of those might introduce vibrato (or be able to be programmed to do so). Though just like a mod wheel, you also have to deal with whether you can effectively operate that while playing your left hand part. Aftertouch is a great feature, but unfortunately, the least expensive arranger with that feature is probably the Korg PA1000 at over $2k (in the U.S.).