Back in the day, you paid £45 GBP ($80 USD) for FOUR (count 'em) styles from Roland, if you wanted to expand your E-20/30. And they were terrific, robust, usable musical styles, almost without exception.

Now you pay NOTHING for THOUSANDS of styles and they are mediocre at best, feeble at worst.

I would love to see Roland's in-house programmers going back to to writing styles. The "Gold" styles that were bundled with the E-80 v2 upgrade are an excellent example of old school Roland styles - authentic, generic, genuinely usable styles - that get a lot of play on my 'board. I'd happily pay for more.

mr9000.... It's entirely up to you whether you want to share your original styles or not. I wasn't suggesting that. But it would be interesting to HEAR a few of them, and get to understand what you are talking about. Are you actually claiming your own self made styles are BETTER than the ROM styles? Or just in genres that the ROM doesn't cover?

As I said, I've been listening to and collecting user styles and translations for quite a while, and the ones amongst them that even come CLOSE to the quality of the best ROM could be counted on one hand... One of the things I have noticed lately is the dramatic difference that multi-velocity drumkits have made to the 'reality' and dynamics of modern ROM styles. Unfortunately, Gary, few of the older styles even had ANY dynamics in them, yet alone match up well with the samples in my arranger. And that isn't even taking into consideration all the 'ghosting', flam and extra hi-hats, etc., that didn't even exist in those older kits.

There is something about a style being played on the instrument it was developed on that is utterly different from a translation, even to a later model from the same maker. They are always poor country cousins to the original. And that difference becomes greater, the more complex the drum kit becomes.

It would be interesting to hear just how many, even with all the extra work, of your 'web' found styles that equal the best of your ROM ones. Or even hear a short demo of any of them.

Back in the days of GM drumkits, translation used to be easier, but now most manufacturers have tossed standardization out the window, velocity curves and switch points are all completely different between manufacturers, and to my ears, even the best of what was around ten years ago sounds stiff and dated compared to the new stuff.

This is why I think it is SO important to find a way that the creators of the current ROM styles find a way to be able to continue by themselves. Most people think they are doing a great job (the ROM styles is probably the #1 selling point of an arranger to most people - great OS, lousy styles = no sale!). and most people would like a lot MORE...

How else are we going to get this?

I agree that on a modern arranger, trying to create a decent style, or even a single decent style PART, from scratch - is all but impossible unless you are a studio-grade performer and a top-notch computer head to boot. That said, one feature I do find particularly useful is the "Style Assembly" that Yamaha gives on the PSR-3000 (etc.). Taking existing parts from various styles and combining them in different ways provides immense flexibility in customizing styles to fit your particular needs.

Ironically, the custom style creation features were more relevant a decade ago, when the styles and parameters were simpler - the gap between a stock style and a user style was not as noticeable.