I play a Tyros5 and have noticed that most styles, even commercial song styles - have patterns that are 2 or 4 bars long. This becomes stale very quickly. I came across these videos (URLs are below) about the styles on Lowrey organs that "evolve" in time and change appropriately to the music, since the patterns used are very long. See the discussion in the videos about the styles. Why can't we have such styles in our Yamaha keyboards either from Yamaha or commercially? Is there anyone selling such long-pattern styles?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2B0prS24B4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw-UBKHY4J0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2g8TUM_p6o

why buy them just create your own and make them any way you like?
this is a very powerful feature hardly anyone uses on an arranger keyboard.

Ditto!

If you build the "evolution" (variation) into the style pattern, you're locked into always having the changes occur four measures in, eight measures in, etc. If it's a typical pop song with 8 bars, a 4-bar chorus, etc., that might work and save you a little button-pushing.

But most if not all of today's arrangers have four variations already built into the style. So you can play 4 bars, trigger variation 2, then var 3 for the chorus, back to var 2 for the second verse, var 4 for the bridge, etc.

One of the tips I read about style creation, is to build the most complex variation first, and then simplify it / thin it out for the simpler variations. If you create a pattern eight bars long for var 4, and truncate it to four bars for var 3, it will "wrap" and play through twice. If you truncate it to just two bars for var's 2 and 1, it will play through four times. This saves a lot of work!

I agree with your premise and wouldn't own an arranger without a style creator, unless I already had a way to make or convert custom styles for that brand.

I don't know personally... anyone that can produce great styles from scratch

It is not easy, even if you are a great player.

Same with making SMF's from scratch ( You need a great ear and the skill to record what you hear).

Sure we can get reasonable results morphing from one style to another... but that is not exactly making your own styles.

Many Ketron styles are very long, 8 to 16 measures, some more. Still the variety must be subtle. Making styles is hard.

Everyone wants easy to play styles....then in the next sentence people want to strip them down with less parts, change this, change that,
say they are too hard to create, etc, .... that is why we have arrangers and workstation synths, DAW/VST's etc,...
you choose what you need and want to accomplish and enjoy creating music in the way that YOU prefer.
It's all out there just pick and choose.
There is hardly nothing your mind can't do musically
in today's advanced technological scene with gear of your choice.
have fun.

"Everyone wants easy to play styles....then in the next sentence people want to strip them down with less parts, change this, change that,"


Donny, mainly because we want to keep the same band all night.. same piano, same bass player, same drummer, same guitar player etc..

thinning out the style also makes it easier to fit what you are playing live..

If you aren't playing any accomp parts and just sing, you will get by, but I rather not compromise what works better for me..

PS: At the end of the gig I still don't have to pay my band..

Amen to that Fran! I don't make enough to share it with anyone except "she who must be obeyed".

Hi
We had a discussion on this topic a few months back.
You can do 32 bar styles, but not necessarily ideal.
I played around with these longer patterns , using Band in a Box styles, as a source.

Tend to think if you really want variety, use the pads.

You can actually lengthen the existing patterns, in the editor, if remember correctly.

Changing instruments and their volumes, and PADS and full left-hand chords. Longer is not necessarily better.

John C.

Thanks for all the replies and strong opinions about using the various style sections and multipads etc. What I feel is still missing in the Yamaha styles are countermelodies that fill in your own playing. The styles are mostly rhythmic with some short "phrase" riffs, but theses are mostly "stabs" and shorter than a countermelody phrase would be. I know that we can program the multipads to do this, but give the amount of time to create good styles and multipads, it would be nice if Yamaha or commercial style producers could give this some thought, even if they styles are somewhat song specific.

Sam

Unless the style is written for a specific song, there's no way the arranger can know what you're going to play next. It only reacts to what you actually do play in real time. And it's a computer, so it will always give the same output for a given "input" (your chords.)

The newer Ketrons have some optional style control parameters that do interesting things with 6ths, 7ths, and the bass to be more authentic to certain genres of music. I'm not sure if you can change these parameters in the middle of a song. You might check this out if you can find a Ketron in a store to audition (or take a look at some of AJ's recent demos.)

Other options would be to add tensions to certain chords when you play the second verse. I.e., Cmaj7 or Cadd9 instead of C. I'm weak on music theory, not sure if this would work. Depending on the CASM (style pattern) you might get a different sound.

Activating RH harmony / ensemble aka "melody intelligence," and using strings with slow-ish attack for the 2nd voice might create an interesting effect on some ballads.

Finally, you could try using bass inversion if you're not already. Playing the chords in different inversions for the second verse, or substituting a relative minor chord can be used to force the bassline. In a lot of 70s singer-songwriter stuff, I find that a descending bassline is the 'counter-melody.' Yamahas have a mode called "AI Fingered" that's supposed to facilitate playing slash chords, 13ths, etc. You could experiment with this, and also the "AI Full Keyboard" mode. I'm not a pianist, and personally I find the latter a bit unpredictable. I'm also not sure if you can change these easily during a song (you might have to embed the chord recognition settings in registrations.)

Why not spend a few minutes experimenting, see what you get! My $.02.

I surly is very possible if you know how ..

One thing that should be noted: Many brands of arrangers have separately-defined style patterns for Major, Minor, and 7th chords. The default is that each chord type will follow the same pattern (of course changing the third and seventh scale degrees, as expected.) But you can make the patterns noticeably different when creating or editing a style.

Yamaha also provides limited support for this functionality, in a style section called the CASM. At least up through the Tyros 5 generation, you could not access all features of the CASM with the on-board Style Creator. You had to copy the style to your PC and use a 3rd party utility to create these variations based on chord type. FYI.

Roland does this very well..