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Hi! I'm a first year public school music teacher. At one of my two schools, our classroom instrument is a Yamaha P-200 "Electric Piano". Whenever I play, the notes continue to sustain like a pedal is being held down, but there is no pedal attached. I've tried to find some setting to correct this, but haven't had much luck. I'm a piano player that is fairly familiar with digitals, but they are mostly newer model Clavinova on other brand digital pianos (the other school has the Suzuki version of a Clavinova). I'm not sure of the age of this instrument, but it seems like it is probably from 90s (not sure). It seems pretty heavy duty to be a newer instrument.

This is the instrument that will accompany all of my concerts. Moving the other digital over for the concert is not an option and there is no money for anything new. Does anyone have an idea of how to correct the problem or is the instrument shot?

Is there a pedal attached? If not, pick one up and attach it. It is possible it had a pedal and had it unplugged while it was still on and messed with the settings (I'm thinking similar to when sometimes you plug in a pedal and its default it to on when the pedal is not pressed and off for pressed). This may be a way to troubleshoot it a bit - plus, you want a pedal

Several things could have happened:

My guess would be that someone was pressing the sustain pedal the last time it was played or unplugged. To correct the problem, I would try plugging in a pedal before turning it on next time, and then pressing the pedal after it's powered up. Just a guess.

On the other hand, someone could have assigned CC64 to the mod wheel or to the data entry sliders. Try moving each to see if affects the sustain.

Or they might have done either of the above for the default performance. Try changing performances to see if other performances have a pedal-up sound. If so, you can go back to the default performance and edit it so that pedal-up is the default setting. Or they might have assigned the Organ Combination with a strange envelope. See page 16 of the manual for Performance Parameters: http://download.yamaha.com/api/asset/file/?language=hu&site=hu.yamaha.com&asset_id=7058

Or it could be booting up in Dual mode, with both a piano and, say, strings loaded, so that after a note is released, the longer decay of the strings is heard.

It's less likely, but possible, that someone could have used software and made pedal-down the default sound, or increased the release portion of the envelope.

Try a factory reset: Hold down the midi and edit buttons while the dp is off, and while holding them, turn on the power and release all.

Thank you all for your suggestions. After finally finding the pedal, I plugged it in. It works, but the opposite way. When the pedal is not pressed it sustains and when its pressed, it dampens. Suggestions for how to fix this?

Do a factory reset. That really should be the first step in figuring things out. This will wipe out any odd user settings.

try turning it off, then turning it back on with the pedal depressed.

You could buy an M-Audio SP-2 pedal. It has a switch that changes it from "normally-open" to "normally-closed".

So it'll work on _any_ DP.

Note -- if, by chance, you're already using an M-Audio pedal, the switch is on the bottom (floor side).

. Charles

+1 that's what I would try first. Then if it works see of there's a polarity switch on the pedal.

+1 Yup, I'm fairly confident this is the issue and this should solve it