Although I own a S950...I am still not convinced these audio styles are the bees knees.....when I listen to styles like this the drums just sound disjointed from the other style sounds/parts as if they were coming from two Different sources instead of a all together live band? sad how there is NO way To edit the drum kits, etc,..The arrangement is wonderful but to me it just doesn't seem to all com together what do you think? I'll just say this if EVERY style on the KB was Audio driven I wouldn't have this KB. I wanna love the audio styles but I can't at this time.
Thank the lord the MIDI styles & sounds sound fantastic!!.....for now. Just being honest.

Donny, I thought the drums sounded just fine.

They are different than the MIDI styles, but for me that is a good thing. So much of the complaints about Yamaha boards is that they all sound too much like polished CD's. To me, the audio styles have a sound that is not quite so polished. Much more like real drummers many of us have played with. Every drummer out there is not Buddy Rich. I would not want the keyboard to have only audio styles because I love the punch on many of the midi styles. However, for me, they are a nice change and so far I am using some of them on my gigs with excellent results.

Joe

The audio big band, jazz combo, and some of the Latin sytles sound really good to me. However I just played the 950 at a noisy guitar center ( I actually convienced a guy to buy one - I knew way more than the salesman) Perhaps they don't sound good through a PA??? Anyways I'm not hearing anything "disjointed" on the demos that you posted Donny but you have spent alot more time with the instrument than me... I do hear quite a bit (maybe too much) reverb on the drums and that is a drag that you can't edit that.

Listen again....by disjointed I mean....drums vs rest of the song sound like two different sources like Live drummer playing along with a cd backing track....its sonically incorrect IMO.

Not only are the audio drums a bit wet for some, the problem is that a reverb setting in the regular reverb processor that matches the rooms that the drums were recorded in is sadly missing. So this makes matching the space and timbre the drums are in to any other sounds you use with them pretty hard to do.

And this is what I think Donny is hearing.

Pros often have really different reverb needs than 'home users', who usually have their arranger set up in a living room or bedroom that is sonically dead... Pros play in larger rooms, often with a lot of hard surfaces, so the room they are in is quite lively already. So, how do you mix the audio drums? It seems, at least to me, that Yamaha have mixed these drums for the dead environment.

Bottom Line.....if I can't edit my sound I won't use it.

The thing about the Yamaha audio styles, is that they are all different, recorded in different environments. Some are excellent, many have too much reverb. I'm using 4 or 5, and they are really good. They don't stand out so much that they make the midi styles sound bad though. At least no worse than usual.
DonM

Yes Don only a few are usable and that's with only
"SOME OF THE VARIATIONS" involved within the style,.......
I think the S950 is the "Guinea Pig" for the New T5 ...if these audio styles aren't received & acclaimed by the masses I predict Yamaha will drop them in coming models & work on a new angle,......just my take on it.

And I imagine that most S950 users will only use about that percentage of the audio styles, at least in a pro environment...

That seems like an awful lack of styles to justify an entirely new major feature. Just imagine what else could have been added to the PSR line if the major R&D for this barely useful feature had been tasked to, say, a better Songbook, or better MIDI drum kits, or simply adding a loop capability to the audio Multi-Pads.

TBH, the audio multi-pads would be a groundbreaking feature IF it had the ability to loop. Adding electronica and breakbeat loops to standard drumming is THE sound of today's contemporary music. Yamaha have already made it easy to import .Wav files, opening a vast library of just about any content you can imagine... Scrub-board playing for Zydeco, moody chillout loops for chilldown music, spacy drones for ambient music...

Yamaha have probably unwittingly created the ONE feature that might bring young musicians back to the arranger fold. But doh! They forgot the loop command!

They make a strong case for gun control, as badly as they have shot themselves in the foot!