I sincerely belive the main advantage of acquiring large numbers of high-quality styles is it provides your audiences with diversity. Granted, there seems to be a number of styles that get lots of use, the same as there are a small number of voices that are used more than others. However, after a while I find this has the tendency to make many performances sound repetitive.

Consequently, this was inspiration to create the first gig disk, which for me was the best way to organize hundreds of style files, many of which had the same names. And, when the PSR-3000 became available, those disks, along with others, were transferred to the USB thumb drive. Sure, this all takes a fair amount of work, but it's worth ever minute you spend. By renaming those style files, Big-Band-Fast, Slow Rock, etc, to song titles, and having the ability to select them instantly, you can create your own library of songs, one that can be accessed on the fly. The styles can be linked directly to registrations, all of which can be stored on the thumb drive or smart media card. What a wonderful tool for OMB entertainers.

While the new arranger keyboards offer huge numbers of excellent styles and voices, there are some that many of us will likely never, or at least rarely, ever use. Many of the techno beats and similar genre styles are not suitable for my audiences. However, I'm confident that for some performers, those same styles will be useful.

I'll continue to search through the myriad of style files, play every one of them, evaluate their quality, and more than likely continue to discover one in a hundred that has sufficient quality to be used during my performances. If I only found a dozen new styles each year, that's OK, becuase that translates into a dozen good songs. That's what keeps those creative juices flowing. Kinda' like Uncle Dave when he discovers a new keyboard--only I didn't spend as much money.

BTW: Just a foot-note about the gig disks. At last count, there were in excess of 125,000 downloads since the first one was posted a little over 2 years ago.

Cheers,

Gary

[This message has been edited by travlin'easy (edited 03-15-2005).]