How do I hook up my music keyboard?

How do I hook up my music keyboard?

Q Can you tell me how to connect my Yamaha PSR-E403 keyboard to my Windows 10 computer? The ports on the keyboard’s rear panel are labelled ‘USB’, ‘SUSTAIN’, ‘PHONES/OUTPUT’ and ‘DC IN 12V’.

Graham Haddon

A Physically, all you need is a USB cable – specifically, a USB Type-B to Type-A, like the AmazonBasics example pictured above right (around £5 from www.snipca.com/40927). The Type-B end plugs into your keyboard, while the Type-A connector plugs into a standard USB port on your computer.

You’ll also need a driver so that Windows recognises your keyboard. The problem here is that your Yamaha model was released 16 years ago, in 2006, and has long been discontinued. Even if you still have the driver CD that came with it, there’s very little chance it would work in Windows 10.

The good news is that other owners of this keyboard say they have successfully used the driver for the PSR-E433 keyboard instead. This later model was released in 2012. It’s still old in technology terms, and has also been discontinued by Yamaha – but at the time of going to press the support page for this product was still online and offering downloadable drivers (see screenshot above left).

We can’t guarantee these will work with your keyboard, but if you want to try them, visit www.snipca.com/40930 where you’ll find links to both 32bit and 64bit Windows 10 drivers.