How many of you edit your styles on your Arranger Keyboards ?

What do you normally edit ?

I often find it necessary. Most arrangers don't have old-time country styles, with perhaps walking bass.
I take a Big Band or Jive style, change the sounds--brass to guitars, maybe strings to vocal OOOhs, change the bass sound and/or drum kit. It's pretty easy on most modern arrangers. You find a style that is close and make it sound like you want it to sound.
Other styles often sound better with different sounds for the style parts, or perhaps mute some of the style parts.
Many Korg styles have abrupt endings that are not musical at all. You can edit and fix those with a little time, although I usually just play around them. It's my biggest pet peeve with Korg, those style endings sound like someone just pulled the power plug and they stop dead, no sustain, no riffs, nothing.

With my Genos the first thing i often do is mute some tracks..

After that...
In general i edit the voices and volumes..
Add some dsp effects on the genos
Whats great on Genos is that you can replace a single drumsound in a drumset.
Also sometimes when needed i add a new baseline
Because in modern music often the baseline is defining.

I like to play rubato. This is great for practicing new songs, casual sing-alongs with friends, and also for church hymns that never use drums, and sometimes change meter in the middle of the song! So on almost every arranger KB I own, I've programmed styles or variations that function like Yamaha's "freeplay" styles. It's really not difficult as long as the keyboard has "Arranger Hold" and "Retrigger", OR Sync Stop.

Usually I'll start with an orchestral style like Slow Waltz. I mute all the tracks I don't need (such as drums, and anything with chromatic phrases.) This for rubato playing, so drum beats and a rhythmic bass pattern make no sense, since they are anchored to a specific time signature.

The key to a freeplay style, is to extend both the bass note, and the string pad(s) for the full duration of the style pattern. Having made these adjustments, IF the style engine supports "retrigger" behavior, when you release the keys in the chord recognition area and press them again, the arranger will sound a new chord.

If the keyboard doesn't have an "Arranger Hold", "Arranger memory", or retrigger, then the only way you can achieve this effect is to activate sync stop. Doing so resets the style pattern to Measure 1 Beat 1 every time you release the keys. The difference between turning off arranger "hold" and using sync stop, is that in the latter case, even the drums will stop (but that's ok, we're not using them here.)

If you have to go the Sync Stop route, you probably won't be able to use fills. You might not even be able to do a MIDI quick record on the keyboard itself, IF the built-in MIDI recorder is tied to the style start and stop. (Of course you can always send just the note messages to an external sequencer or DAW, which doesn't know or care about sync stop.)

To facilitate smooth transitions from one chord to another, you might have to extend the decay and release times of your style tones. You also might want to revoice the style. I'll typically use organ sounds (especially for church music.) But strings and brass sections also work. On instruments like piano and guitar, the sound dies away rather quickly, so if you hold the chord for very long it falls silent.

With sustaining instruments, you may hear a glitch when the style pattern "wraps." So to minimize this, you should make the pattern as long as possible. The gate times (note duration) you'll see in event edit will get very large. (Think whole notes tied together for 32 measures and you get the idea!) The arranger is just a musical computer so it doesn't care.

A lot of people think that freeplay styles are some kind of mysterious Yamaha magic. They're not- just an imaginative use of what any good programmable arranger has been able to do since the mid-1990s! Hope you find this helpful.

Oh- one more important thing I forgot to mention... If the pad track plays at least a full triad, you can send this note data over MIDI, and use it to control the style engine of a SECOND arranger, in real time! I happen to love Roland's chord fingering. Yamaha's not so much. But Yamaha has the biggest library of styles, and a big color screen. So I use the output from a very basic style on the Roland to control the Yamaha's style engine.

Another cool thing about hooking up two arrangers as I've described: With a single arranger, "Hold" applies to ALL of the tracks. When you play, they all sound, and when you release the keys they all fall silent. But if you control one arranger with another via MIDI, the "master" running the freeplay style will generally create a sound only on key press. The second arranger will work the way we're used to, i.e., the style will run continuously based on the last played chord. This gives you a lot more flexibility, with multiple tracks, bass notes, and custom voicing, than you would get just by activating the "lower" voice in a single arranger setup. Most of us have more than one arranger lying around. If you've never experimented with MIDI'ing two arrangers together, I highly recommend it!