Hi Folks: I have a style Wien waltz that I called up. I want to create a User Program for the Song Mr. Bojangles with just drms and bass so that I can play piano part and sing. I went into Make Up tools and muted everything except the drums and bass pressed "Write" on my User Program List and it appears to save it. I exit and when I return to User Program all the instruments are back in. What am I doing wrong? I posted this over at the Roland forum too. Thanks for the help.

Brian

Hi Brian,
I have an E-50 which is very similar, but it's put away right now. If I remember there's a way to do what you want without using Makeup Tools. Press the "Mixer" button until the touch screen shows the volume for all style parts. Turn the volume to zero for everything but Drums & Bass. Then save these settings as a user program.

Note you can still use Cover & Makeup Tools to easily change the drum & bass to Acoustic, Pop, etc. And I'm pretty sure the volume of the other parts will remain zero for all style variations and fills, so you still have some flexibility with the style.

One last comment... Is your E-60 running the latest OS v1.1.1? My experience with Rolands is that they're pretty buggy out of the box. Using the most recent OS solves a lot of problems. Good luck!

Ask Fran Carango........Roland expert.

Brian, when you edit with the make up tools , you have to save the style..it will over write the original style(if saved externally), so you can rename it...After the "new" style is saved you can save it in a program.

Brian, the easier way to mute parts, is from the mixer section, instead of make up tools...just mute the parts of the style and resave as a user program

If you press the Style Page button TWICE, you get to a nice screen with each Style Part's Volume, Pan, Reverb and Chorus, and a pretty little icon of the Tone type at the top. If you press on the icon, it mutes that sound. Now if you save the Performance, those mutes get saved.

Does the E60 have the D-Beam, too? One of the options for the D-Beam is to mute the ACC Parts (but not Bass and Drums). So you could save the Performance with the ACC mutes on, leave the D-Beam active, and you can now switch the ACC Parts back on any time you want them (and mute them again, quickly).

The REALLY cool thing is, you can STILL mute out ACC Part icons, and have that sound not play at all, but use the D-Beam to toggle on and off the other sounds. It isn't an 'all or nothing' affair.

There's a lot of power under the hood of those things...

Oh, and don't forget to take advantage of the Dynamic Arranger feature. This way, as you play louder or softer, the style parts will also get a bit louder or softer. Great with those vel-switched drumkits! There is an edit page (it gets saved to the User Program) so if the rise and fall is more or less than you want, you can adjust it here.

One of the quite astonishing things the Roland's can do is trigger the style from full PianoStyle mode, Bass inversion on, Dynamic arranger on, D-Beam set to turn the ACC Parts on and off (and you permanently mute out the style's piano part/s) and you can get a quite scarily accurate band backing that follows YOUR inversions, YOUR dynamics, and goes from Drums and Bass to fuller accompaniment at your whim. Done well, it is quite amazing.

As you get used to having to HAVE to play three notes before you get a new chord, if you practice playing solos VERY carefully so you only ever hold two notes at a time, the accompaniment can stay on one chord and you can play some quite interesting outside stuff without the chord recognition freaking out.

There's a fairly detailed article I wrote at the Roland-arranger.com website that goes into this in more detail.

I enjoyed all my Roland kbs....to bad they dropped out of the Totl arranger game for now........Korg remains my choice!

I suggest using a 6/8 pattern in stead of a 3/4 ... the backbeat should be on beat number 4, and not an "oom pah pah" feel.
Think "Piano Man", "If You Don't Know Me By Now", or "At This Moment". All those styles will work well.

Maybe a nice Jazz Waltz would make it lilt along...

Only if you pry them from my cold, dead hands!