I've owned several Yamaha arrangers over the years, along with a Korg PA80 and a Casio MZ2000 ( I still have both of the latter). Since I do play harder edged blues, jazz and Rock, I find that I have to work more to get the Yamaha styles to sound better, as opposed to my other arrangers.

Tweaking the effects and eq settings on my T2 helps some, but I get the best results when I do it in combination with making eq and effect adjustments in my outboard mixer. I rarely feel the need to put either the PA80 or MZ through the mixer in this way, as they usually tend to sound optimum to me "outta the box". OTOH, no matter how I tweak the internal eq and effect settings in the T2, I can't get it to sound somewhat close to what I want to hear without playing it through my mixer.

Then, in order to make the style themselves a little more dynamic, I like to tweak my styles by adding or modifying drum parts. It doesn't always take that much, sometimes adding a few ghost notes and slightly altering the timing, particularly on bass drum notes, along with making some adjustments to the dynamics, ie velocity, panning, etc. Other times I might add and subtract regular drum notes. Sometimes I might even add a slight touch of distortion or overdrive to the drum and bass parts, not much of course, but enough so that they don't sound so sterile. I also sometimes like to alter the bass lines and to a lesser extent some of the other instrument sounds as well.

I find with the Korg styles, and even the MZ's to some extent, that there is much less needed to get them to sound more "lifelike" for my preferred genres. Unfortunately, style editing, especially in conjunction with an external sequencer, proves easiest in the MZ, with the PA80 being almost as good to work with and the T2 not so good.

With all this in mind, and since my primary foucus is not playing as a OMB, I can easily see me parting ways completely with Yamaha arrangers and possibly adding a Roland arranger to the mix, or perhaps the PA800 or 2x.

AJ