Yes, styles can be repetitive, but they don’t have to be. There is so much you can do with a style while it’s playing.
A favorite of mine is to put it on “synch start/synch stop. Jab away at the left hand for the first two choruses of a song and bring the style back in on the chorus (or anywhere). Or turn the style off altogether and start it somewhere in the middle of a song (Example: I Can’t Give You Anything But Love…..come in with the steady style on the “release“).
Then you can leave a “fill” running for 8 or 16 measures and end it by going into a different “variation” from the one you left.
You can use the “break” button for as many measures as you want to break up the continuity of the style.
You can stop a style anywhere and fill in a measure with a “pad:…..maybe 4 cymbal or drum hits, etc……and back to the style again
With a little creativity, and a lot of effort, styles don’t have to be boring!
Mark
All great ideas, Mark. I often use sync/stop when using one of Yamaha's (or my own edited version of)
Free-Play styles. Leaving the style run gets boring rather quickly, so having these pauses/stops is probably a necessity rather than a choice.
I often take most of the parts from
Ending I (except for the drums) which is usually a simple stop on a chord, and using
Style Assembly, put these parts in
Intro I. I leave in the Intro I's drums, removing the stick sound in the count-in, and voila! I've got a one bar break/fill stop that I can initiate a little early, and after it plays out, the style is returned to whatever Variation I was on, or decide to have it go to.
All it takes, is, as you say, a little creativity, and perhaps thinking outside the box, to add some variety to the patterns.
If you don't want to go through reprogramming
Ending I parts to
Intro I, often you can just hit Ending I and before it has a chance to fully finish, just press another Variation button (or Fill-in) to get back into the style.
Ian
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