How do the 4 major style brands compare to eachother? What options do they have that other brands dont? How are their factory styles? Which brand gets most 3rd party and user created styles?

With Styles being the core of an aaranger, what does set them appart? Basically they all have 8 tracks, 4 varriations and 3 or 4 intros and endings.

It is not only the styles that make the arranger, but the internal sound engine and voices that give the style the extra sound quality, realism, and comparable programming quality. The style programming needs the tools and voices to program great usable styles.

I particularly like the Yamaha styles with the, mega, SA, SA2 voices, DPSs, audio options, expansion, and large selection of styles, linked Multipads, and OTS settings.

Marcus

ditto..

Yep!

Unplugged styles on Korg are great. It's nice you can delete or edit factory styles.
Ketron sounds most live.
Yamaha styles do a lot FOR you. You have to be careful using their intros and endings because most people can't play that well, and they are EXPOSED!
I've never had a problem finding all the styles I need for any arranger in the past 7 or 8 years.
There may be a hundred thousand for Yamaha out there, but MANY are the same, renamed, slightly tweaked. They have quite a few generations of keyboards that use the same styles, maybe renamed, tweaked a little. Then people convert them for optimum use in older models, or tweak older styles to use in the new ones. Lots of people find a style, change the tempo or something and name it after a song. Doesn't make it a song style though.
How many styles do you NEED, or use? Maybe way fewer than a hundred. . . certainly not a thousand.
Just rambling.
All the newer arrangers have great styles. Depends on what you like to hear.

I only use 30+ just saying... I could do just about anything with that....

I've never counted, but I'm sure it's several hundred.

Gary

Exposed or not, Yamaha styles make any venue rock. And I use what they've created to the max! I'm not out to make everyone believe what a great & able musician I am in the 1st place.

Just sayin.

Henni

The Yamaha styles are the most impressive (And there are 1000s out there) however if you regularly listen to live bands, then you soon realise that they are the least realistic out of the 4 big brands. (Hence I have never rated them)

Roland used to be the best for realism; however they seemed to have dropped the ball of late with the top spot being taken by Korg.

If you like lively styles (Which are typical of the European versions) then Ketron take a lot of beating.

As always these are purely my personal opinions, and should not be taken as an attack on any particular manufacture. (Some users can sometimes take it personally)

Bill

The good thing about Yamaha styles is that there is such an abbundance of styles..

But what makes sthem special to me is the special styles..
- the piano styles i converted from CVP
- the free play styles, which are unique to Yamaha
- the session styles which are much more dynamic then the stadard pro styles
(I dont think the audio styles add much, they are just good styles)
- the new deejay styles prommise to be different.
- mega voices still work great for styles

And the community is great.. Many people share the great stuff they created themselves, and there are dozens of great free tools available that help you when creating stuff.
On top of that it seems much easier to convert other brand styles to Yamaha then the other way around. the good thing when converting Korg, Roland and Ketron styles to Yamaha format is that they bring you that live feeling that the Korg and Ketron developers programmed them with..



Roland however still has the most tools to change their styles sound with just a few clicks and options to make them sound more dynamic, reacting to things like the volume of the left hand..

Ketron Audio styles are unique and not convertible to other brands..

Korg styles are well programmed. They have great guitars mode.

But in general the one with most special types of styles seems is yamaha, session, free play and Deejay seem to be setting them ahead..