Scott,

basically you are right with your impression about the somehow limited 'default' bass pattern in the Yamaha styles. I also have done some tries converting KN5000 styles for my PSR9000 recognizing the
more colorful bass lines.

But I have also seen some disadvantages in having these very specific bass parts, you have to be very careful with your chord progression, otherwise it will sound 'wrong'. It's a little bit the same with the new so called 'Session Styles' on the PSR2000 and the CVP209. They are sounding great on their own, but they don't fit to every song or chord progression.

On the other hand, they are very powerful control mechanisms for the Acmp part in the Yamaha boards to have also more control about the bass line. You could either use the OnBass feature to play the bass you would like to have or or you use the normal Fingerd mode for also play the slash chords like C/E or C/G. With the right usage out of
this feature you can play more or less every bass pattern with your left hand you would like to have.

During a user group meeting here in Germany a few weeks ago we had somebody from Yamaha showing to us the power of the normal Fingered mode for the ACMP (basically this was the guy who had design the ACMP
logic for the Yamaha keys). He was playing something with his left hand with a normal style, and the keyboard was sounding like I had never heard before.

If you are interested, click on
http://www.yamaha.de/ubb/Forum1/HTML/005323.html

for getting more information about this event (only in German, sorry).


You can get an example of the 'Swinging Safari' Song here (played with the normal Swing2 style on the PSR9000):
http://tv-sela.bei.t-online.de/2nd/SwSafari.mp3

and some pictures how to put your fingers on the board to get this behaviour here:
http://tv-sela.bei.t-online.de/2nd/accord.zip


Regards

Ulrich