Well Scott, my experience with Korg has been that they respond very well sometimes, and at other times not so well. No worse than the other major companies I suspect though. Hey we could bug 'em about it and see what happens, because if they come up with a successor to the PA80 and it includes the features I spoke of in my last post ( and better style fills ), it's a pretty good bet that I will get one.

Now you're talking Bob. I like doing the same thing ( not when playing live of course ). I don't have a Yamaha board anymore, but I have XG works which alows creation via chords and Yamaha styles in step time, and I have most of the conversions available for the PA80. It's pretty cool to be able to mix and match parts from different styles. It's a breeze to do in the PA80, and in XG works too. Add a cool drum part made by Jammer pro or a "handmade" drum piece from a hybrid tracker program like Midi tracker or Pump sequencer and I have a lot of options when creating stuff to play to.

AJ

You know, those long loops can actually work AGAINST you too. I transfered a Korg pattern called "Dorian" from the earlier "i" series. This is a very cool, swing pattern with a beautiful walking bass line. It rivals my own, and has become one of my favorite patterns, however it's an 8 bar loop. This makes it all "out of whack" when I do a blues number that is written in 12 bar sections. There is an obvious "strangeness" in the pattern when it is 4 bars off.

I love the pattern, but this is driving me a little batty ! The resetbutton can bring the downbeat back to "1", but it won't reset the pattern to the 1st bar of the loop ...it just deals with the measure at hand.

Interesting topic.

I own a Roland VA-7 and I am not always satisfied with the styles. Therefore I have to make my own styles sometimes which do not sound perfect most of the time, but make a song more realistic. It's the only way not to 'cheat' (using a SMF for instance is 'fake' in my opinion). A lot of styles that came with the VA-7 were too specific and then we had a way to long ending and sometimes also the same useless length on the intro. Then I found some converted styles (X1 to G1000) and loaded them into my keyboard. That was a pretty good and very welcome addition! It adjusted the balance a bit, unfortunately not everything was sounding that good, when talking about the styles (I left the 'old' styles on this issue).

As you may have noticed, I'm very critical about this issue, because I think that styles are very very important. I just can't play my entire repetoire with about 20 styles.

Kind regards,
Sander

Yes, there are too many styles! I find many of them have distortion, sour notes and incorrect instrument assignments. I have tried messing with them , in the past but it seems that there are so many good ones, why waste time trying to upright a deraile style.
I've decided to try to stick to only styles created for Yamaha keyboards with 4 variations. I make up floppies for each stylr type, eg 'Boogie', 'Swing', 'Rock' etc. Then as I'm travelling through a music book, if I find a style that suits a song very well, I rename the style to that song. I also write at the top of the page, in the book, what the name and location of the style is, either internal, user or floppy. Eventually I will create a floppy(s) dedicated to each song book. There can be more than one style that is approprate for a particular song. So as I get out a song book to play from, I merely have to plug in the appropriate style disk and I can travel through the entire book without interuption. Of course I would still audition any new styles and try to fit them in, if they are usable.
Any thoughts?

Brian

Brian,
that's an excellent habit you have! I too write at the top of the page (in my music-books) the best styles for each song. Another thing you could do, if you have a keyboard with an internal storage device (hard disk, zip disk) is to save a registration for each song, with the appropriate style, tempo and instruments. That's even faster!



[This message has been edited by Dreamer (edited 11-18-2002).]

Sander,
where have you been? It's great to see you posting again! How is your right arm going?

True! I don't need that many styles either. I think the reason arranger maker make all those styles is to cater to the general masses. Maybe what they can do is selling an arranger with no style for less $$$ and then users will purchase only the style they needed ???

At the close of my last few outings, I had the same thought about how the number of styles I actually used = not much!

..rb

I also agree that quality, and not quantity is the most important factor for me. There is a glut of poor quality conversions now available for the yamaha keyboards, most of which are harmonically incorrect and will not give proper results when playing anything other than a simple major or minor chord. However I also have to criticise many of the preset styles as being too fussy and too indicative of particular songs. Remember the old days when all we had was a rock, swing, march, pops and bossa? It was easy to play almost anything to those simply bass/chord and drum patterns. Nowadays you sit daydreaming after the intro has played, totally lost for what to play with some of these styles! They sound fantastic, expertly musically programmed by the yamaha musicians but quite often it leaves you having to think so carefully about what to play. Its a good idea to experiment with turning off parts of the style, i often like to mute the pads, phrases and separate chord sections and just use a simpler backing.
Perhaps thats what we need, more simpler styles!

Simon


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________________________
Simon G.K. Williams
simon@svpworld.com
Creative Music & Multimedia
http://www.svpworld.com
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To have a big quantity of styles does not
necesarely mean that they are of low quality.
It depends on youre own editcapalities.
I think most of you could have a big quantity
with high quality when you took more time
for editing your own styles.
As an example you can place a guitarstrum-
track or guitarharmonicstrack beside a guitar
track when you want the guitar sounds better.
At least on a VA7/76.

[offtopic]
Hi Andrea!

Doing very well, great to see you again. It's been a long time since I have been here, true. The right arm is doing great again, except the fact that when I have played for a while, my elbow is making a 'click' sound when I stretch my arm again. But besides that, everything allright! I hope you are doing well too over there in Italy, just like the others around here
[/offtopic]

About the quality/quantity issue; of course quality is very very important. But if the styles do not suit, than I need to find another style and 'abandon' that other style. The Style Morpher is a great feature, but not usable on every style.

I'm always focussing on the 'Realistic' part and good quality (for use in Gig's). Once it sounds well, I save it (like Andrea explained ) and it's ready for future use. I just can't come up with a too canned style, as a one-man-band keyboard player you have to compete with the bands who can make a song sounding very realistic and natural by putting in those specific soundpieces. Only an SMF/MIDI is the easy way to beat the bands. But I'm always trying to achieve that with styles and modifying them in such a way that they fit.

Maybe this opinion is a little bit too strong, but I hope some of you understand.

[This message has been edited by Sander (edited 11-18-2002).]