One of the biggest problems is making all the style parts coherent to a certain beat.

What I mean is that, to avoid glitches, each of the musical parts should be able to take a chord change at the same point. We can hear it when we play styles and try to force chord changes on them that they don't want to do. When there are long chords on piano sounds, Rhodes sounds, long guitar chords, that sort of thing - if you play a chord in the middle of them, it's glitch city...

Now, most of the time, we simply pick the style that suits the rhythm of the changes. If there's always a new chord on an upbeat, we pick styles that have parts that play on that upbeat. Picking a style that doesn't have anything but long notes across that transition is going to be jumpy and glitchy.

So, one of the things that works well in style creation is to make sure that there are consistent points in ALL the style parts where new notes are being played. Then it's a case of listening to the style of music you are trying to copy, and find out where the changes tend to come. Are they all downbeats, are they often on the 'and' of 2? The 'and' of 4?

I think that this is one of the things that distinguish the pro ROM styles from most amateur efforts...

[This message has been edited by Diki (edited 10-03-2009).]