Hi Chony

Interesting. I had been wondering for some time if using electric drums for longer more realistic patterns might be an option. I am also a drummer, so that would be easy enough to do.

It seems that pretty much all the styles, especially the "modern" music from the '50's and '60's forward sound pretty authentic, because of the simplicity of these styles.

That is not the case in MHO for jazz, swing and foxtrot type styles. They sound far from being realistic. Outside of short spurts of the horn and piano backgrounds, I have been reducing the background parts more and more as I go over time. Even the guitar and bass parts really don't make it.

So, I have experimented using bass pedals, drums and piano. Bass pedals are no problem to me as I am an organist. This definitely makes a difference in sounding very much "real." Only thing is as I tend to be more of an organist than a pianist, if I decide to go this way, I will have to develop a bit better left hand. But besides that, it almost makes me think why bother with an arranger if I'm considering doing all those parts?

So, with all of this, I kept thinking why they can't make some authentic sounding jazz, swing styles realizing that you could have variations of at least 16 bars. That's half of a standard 32 bar song per variation.

If I spent a little time, maybe I could come up with some longer styles using the onboard style creator, but , I have messed with that a bit in the past and it doesn't really thrill me to do this. I would much rather just sit down and play and have Yamaha or somebody else have done the work.

Another thing I noticed when experimenting with bass pedals while using Big Band Med 2, variation B, and using only the drums and rhythm guitar pattern, that when I played the bass part as I felt it and think it pretty much should be, it sounded quite good and natural.

I also then began wondering if a decent bass line recorded with that and other existing styles might do the trick.

Sounds like a lot of work. I wish Yamaha or somebody would put a lot more effort into the older styles of music so they don't sound so canned and fake.

My 2 cents.

Scott
http://ScottLMusic.com