The story
This little synth was bought by my grandma sometime in the late 90s. It has one speaker on the left side of the synth, which is slowly becoming less reliable. Similar to my family piano, it’s seen its fair share of abuse from me and my sisters as we “learn” the piano. She’s more than a little rough around the edges, sometime a earsore. Because of the… Less appealing sound of it, it’s spent a large part of the last 6 years in closets and on shelf’s. I decided to give sampling it a go with my first set of actual mics. I sampled two of my favorite patches and made a distortion pad with the brass patch and a digital Fuckbox type thing. Because there is one speaker, I added a stereo modeler on the non-distorted patches
Reviews for Yamaha Portasound
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Minimal retro
I love the retro sound, because I had a PSS390 back in the 90s. Only the Organ and String patches work for me. The string patch is particularly nice.
The, ahem, fbox didn't work. Also the sound is panned very strongly to the left, which isn't a big deal but left me confused and checking whether it was coming out my headphones or speakers. I mean, it's incredibly minimal, but I love the organ and the strings.Nice retro tunes
This half a gigabyte bundle will give you access to three different patches, each with a different kind of sound. The two main ones are retro-synth based and you will definitely love them if you are into things like old retro games. The third with the... name, is a trippy distorted one that can definitely make things sound interesting, to say the least. Couldn't help but play the infamous Lavender theme with the strings patch!
All Praise the Portasound
I personally love this collection of 3 patches created from a Portasound. The 'Fuckbox' patch is brilliantly dirty and works well doubling up slow basslines. The organ and strings have that characterful tinny sound and I have found great use for them in some hip-hop beats I've been making recently.
The PS-2 Lives!
As a proud owner of a Yamaha PS-2, I was super excited for this library! I think this library did a great job of capturing the essence of this fun little synth. I especially like the patch where the sound was processed through a modular. Given that the PS-2 has a headphone jack, it's a little odd that this was recorded using microphones. I suppose it captures the beauty? of the crappy speaker built in. It might have been nice to include a direct version of the samples too. Given that the PS-2 has only a single mono speaker on the left hand side, I thought it odd that the samplist used a stereo spaced pair of microphones, because all of the sounds ended up panned pretty much left. It would have been better to have used a single mic at closer range, IMHO. Even so, this is a fun library, and I'm sure many people will find it useful.
Good representation but not into this one
The first patch is really distorted which might be what you're looking for but its not my cup of tea. The next two patches both heavily favor one side of the stereo field and to me just sound like a cheap cheesy synthesizer. Im not familiar with this portasound synth. This is probably exactly how the real thing sounds and you've captured it wonderfully. Its just not my vibe at all. In my opinion its just boring, cheesy and "kid like" Please Take my opinion with a grain of salt because i don't like these kinds of sounds anyway so i was bound to not like tis instrument. Im sure people that are into this kind of sound will have a blast with this though. I like some of the kind of "bad" sounding organ type synths that i think sound really cool in loft indie music but i just didn't like the tone and vibe of this one. Thank you for contributing though and i look forward to what you put out in the future
