The Yamaha YRS-23 is a student level recorder. It’s been a little while since I picked up the recorder, but every so often I’ll mess around with it. In grade school everyone had the learn the recorder and we were given a YRS-23 to use, so everyone in the school had one of these. It’s a really basic recorder, definitely designed for students and learning purposes. It’s made out of plastic rather than wood, giving it a slightly different type of sound than you’d hear on a wood recorder. It’s definitely a bright sounding instrument, as most recorders are, but the YRS-23 is especially bright. I’m definitely not a recorder connoisseur, as I’ve only played a handful of them in my day, but the YRS-23 seems to be the easiest one to play that I’ve tried. It comes in a little pouch as well, making it easy for students to bring home and back to school without it getting dirty or breaking. I don’t know that the Yamaha YRS-23 is suitable for anyone other than a student trying to learn the recorder, but I would think that it’s probably not. These are very cheap instruments, making it easy enough for a whole classroom to get one. The recorder is the type of instrument in general that is good to get kids started with, but it doesn’t seem to have too much musical worth in a modern context. Yamaha is the world’s largest musical instrument manufacturer, so they can make it possible to offer these instruments to schools at a very low rate. I doubt that too many of you are young kids, but perhaps if you’re a music teacher you’d want to check this out to see if it would be useful in a school setting. This instrument is definitely a good stepping stone for kids interested in music to get started with…