Yamaha PSR-E263 Review: The Perfect Yamaha Beginner’s Keyboard?

The 61-key Yamaha PSR-E263 is an affordable keyboard designed for beginners and young players. It's a fantastic way to learn a digital keyboard, because it has all the features one would expect in a more advanced keyboard, including instrument voices, accompaniment styles, polyphony, recording capabilities and more. 

However, these capabilities are more limited in number and simpler to execute, so that beginners can learn both analogue and digital musical styles, playing and experimenting, before upgrading to a more complex instrument. 

Because it is lightweight and can be powered by AC or batteries, it can easily be taken anywhere and played indoors or out. And all this is available at a surprisingly reasonable price

The Yamaha PSR-E263 Portable Keyboard has a lot of attractive features to help beginners and young people get the most out of their instrument. 

The Yamaha PSR-E263 is designed for beginners, and is particularly suitable for young beginners. The duo keyboard function is perfect for lessons or accompaniment, while the Yamaha Education system, built-in song library, and aux-in function give lots of opportunities to play and practice beginning to advanced songs.

For children, piano practice can be boring and repetitive, but the option to play the same pieces with a wide range of different instrument voices makes practice more fun and engaging. It has all the features you would expect in a digital keyboard, like transpose, EQ, instrument voices, and reverb, without having so many complex options and settings that might confuse new players.

It has real, robust Yamaha sound, so that it doesn't sound like a cheap, disappointing keyboard, but is still affordable enough that a parent doesn't have to worry about investing in an instrument that a child may not stick with.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Yamaha PSR-E263 is also very popular with piano teachers, who often take a keyboard to different classrooms and lesson locations. They appreciate having a portable keyboard that sounds great and has built-in lessons, keyboard duo functionality, and a metronome. They like the fact that it's affordable, reliable, produces great sound, and that kids really enjoy interacting with the instrument. 

Pros & Cons of the Yamaha PSR E363

Yamaha PSR-E263 Tutorial Videos

Yamaha has made an entire series of quick tutorial videos for specific functions and features of the PSR-E263. You can see them here:

Yamaha PSR-E263 Owner's Manual

At the Yamaha website, you can download the Owner's Manual and a text version of the song book. Find them here:

Yamaha PSR-E263 vs. Yamaha PSR-E363

The Yamaha PSR-E263 is the Yamaha PSR-E363's smaller sibling. The two models are extremely similar, but the E363 has some more advanced capabilities that may make it appealing to a beginner who wants more room to grow. Since the two models are so alike, here's an overview of their differences: 

​In such a head-to-head comparison, the Yamaha PSR-E363 is clearly the better keyboard, and touch responsive keys are a great feature. It's a more robust instrument, and it's not much more expensive than the E263. 

However, the E363 is not compatible with a piano app. This means that controlling all these functions and settings must be done with the LCD screen, which can mean spending a lot of time looking at the manual and pressing buttons. 

Many early learners will not truly appreciate the differences of having 174 more voices, 35 more style presets, or 3 additional types of reverb, particularly if they are cumbersome to access and control. This makes the Yamaha PSR-E363 a better choice for adults, who will make better use of the wider range of features, and who have more need of USB connectivity and melody suppression in their keyboard, even if they are just beginning to learn the piano.  

In other words, both keyboards are great choices for beginners. The Yamaha PSR-E263 is a better choice for young beginners and children, while the Yamaha PSR-E363 is a slightly better choice for older children, adult beginners, and more advanced learners.

The Yamaha PSR-E263 is an exceptional keyboard for a young learner or even an adult beginner. The sound is full and rich, so that adults won't feel like they are playing with a toy. It has a great library of effects and instrument voices, providing lots of opportunity for learning and experimenting.