Monday, January 7, 2019

Yamaha YPT-300 keyboard - key fix

My Uncle Gus gave me a Yamaha YPT-300 keyboard for Christmas. He bought it for my late Aunt Judy. It has 1 broken key (low C) and was missing the sheet music rest. He also gave me a keyboard stand that was missing a screw at the bottom.

Otherwise is a pretty cool keyboard with a bunch of features: MIDI controls, built in speakers, 32 voice polyphony, ability to connect a sustain pedal, and at least 128 voices and beats, plus 4 built-in drumkits. Sound is definitely not bad. My bro and nephew and I had a lot of fun jamming on Christmas Eve.

Found and ordered the sheet music rest today ($25 including shipping on Full Compass) and also spent $25 for a replacement key set from Keyboard Kountry ($25 including shipping) .

So I will need to replace the low C key. Found some good YouTube videos on how to do this:

Video 1: https://youtu.be/q_oUbYPFTqk
Video 2: https://youtu.be/_uToVbDDVC0

There's a bit of yellowing on the keys, so I'm considering doing some Retrobrite peroxide treatment on them, we'll see how it goes.

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Ed Note 2024-01-19: I was able to complete the key replacement repair in September 2020, using the above videos for reference. It went pretty well, no major gotchas, and I took my own videos of the process. The key alignment was a tiny bit off, but not enough so to warrant additional replacement. Wasn't too hard to do. Never did the Retrobrite treatment although I'm sure it would help.