Ok, I play in various churches for various christian meetings, retreates and conferences. As you all may know the christian collection of songs is vast. It is huge and basically the songs are from different styles and ethnic backgrounds. Furthermore, the songs are always performed differently. Sometimes not the whole song is sung and sometimes the chorus is repeated twice. There are different modes and different styles a song can be played with. My point is it is IMPOSSIBLE ...... I MEAN IMPOSSIBLE to ALWAYS use MIDI or prepared SONG. You have to play adhoc and with improvization ALL THE TIME.

So, as a SOLO musician (sometimes I am joined by other musicians but most of the time I am solo), I have two choices:

1) SOLO piano

2) Styles

Solo piano is nice and I play the piano very well. But many times, the STYLES add the needed backing to emulate a band of musicians.

In conclusion, Styles is not simply a taste but a necessity.

However, when it comes to recording a song...

Give me any song recorded by styles and I can take the same song and manually create a better one from scratch. So I am not using STYLES to short-cut CREATIVITY and honest work. But I use styles to SHORT CUT redundant routine easy work which I could have done myself and get better results if I wanted. So think of Styles as a TOOL. A dynamic musician CAN use all the tools and appreciate all the good tools.

For those musicians who get angry that a person with styles can generate EQUIVALENT or BETTER recording or performance, HOW COME YOU CANNOT generate a better MIDI from scratch? WHY? The problem is not with these people, the problem is WITH YOU who cannot generate BETTER results than the styles. I CAN. That's the reason if I have the time, I end up editing the tracks that were created by styles or even replace them from scratch.

Let me even explain this further. for those synths that utilize a looped sequence of events, that is also a tool to short cut redundancy and repetitive work. The synth itself is a tool.

By the way, not all style performances fool me. I can tell whether this person is good musician or not from listening to his styles.

Also Styles can be great learning tool for beginner and those who have been playing for long time alike. I do not equate how long have a player been performing with how advanced he is. Some of the performers are still playing at the same level. I submit to everyone that STYLES can be an excellent tool to advance own music. Why? because some of the styles have been written by very professional musicians. If you can learn to perform or write from these styles, you can advance your own music. If you can emulate the intro and endings of styles, this even becomes better.