I'm curious how the drum parts from Yamaha styles behave in the PA. I expect there's some conversion required, guess I'm curious how much setup effort is involved in getting the parts to match up and sound if not the same, at least similar.

thanks in advance for any/all insights....

Hi Tom,
some of the individual drums won't match up because of Yamaha's drum mapping. Example any drum notes below Bass Drum
(note 35) could differ between the 2 machines.
Having said that, there is the option of creating user drum sets in the PA800 to try & match the psr drums as closely as possible. ie try & recreate the psr's drum mapping. Ie you can actually alter the drum type for a note just say E1 is a drum roll on a PA800, but on a PSR it's a brush sound. You can actually edit the E1 on the PA800 to be a brush sound to try & match the psr.

I think this may be the method I will use If I need to convert any of my psr styles across to the PA800.

I'm not always happy with the way EMC converts drum tracks, I prefer to do a midi to style conversion if only for the drum tracks themselves.

If using an EMC converted style you'll probably have to do some tweaking.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by tom moon:
[B]

I would like to add to what Rikki wrote that both Korg and Roland give you the ability to edit individual percussions within a drumkit. This means, for example, that you can change the brush sound that corresponds to E1 until it matches the sound on the PA-800.
This is part of a general philosophy common to all Yamaha arrangers, kind of "take it the way it is, since we did already the job for you". Only problem with that approach is that, if you are not satisfied with what you've got, you have little chance to modify it.
I guess that it's for this approach that many people consider the Yamaha aimed to the home market, which -as we know- is composed mainly of people who want just to sit down at their keyboard and play, without having to worry too much about details like editing a drumkit.

Andrea excactly both Korg & Roland give you so much more in the way of editing all parts of Styles, Smf, EFX, & beyond....
I couldn't of said it better.

However, Roland don't allow you to SAVE the edited kit, so you have to re-do your work for every style. Korg's system, where you can save the edited kit makes the chore of converting many styles from the same manufacturer much easier...

BTW, when you are converting Live! kits from Yamaha (or any other keyboard with velocity-switched drum sounds), it helps a LOT to try to recreate the same split points at the same velocities. Those styles are designed to take advantage of those splits, and getting the wrong crossover point can change the feel and accents quite a lot.

One of the tricks that Roland's Makeup Tool editor can do is to add or subtract velocity from a drum sound (as well as the whole kit), followed by a volume control for the drum sound, so it is fairly easy to approximate the x-over points without the drum sound getting too quiet or loud. Attention to these little details can go a LONG way to making a converted style as dynamic as the original...