Changing instruments and their volumes, and PADS and full left-hand chords. Longer is not necessarily better.

John C.

Thanks for all the replies and strong opinions about using the various style sections and multipads etc. What I feel is still missing in the Yamaha styles are countermelodies that fill in your own playing. The styles are mostly rhythmic with some short "phrase" riffs, but theses are mostly "stabs" and shorter than a countermelody phrase would be. I know that we can program the multipads to do this, but give the amount of time to create good styles and multipads, it would be nice if Yamaha or commercial style producers could give this some thought, even if they styles are somewhat song specific.

Sam

Unless the style is written for a specific song, there's no way the arranger can know what you're going to play next. It only reacts to what you actually do play in real time. And it's a computer, so it will always give the same output for a given "input" (your chords.)

The newer Ketrons have some optional style control parameters that do interesting things with 6ths, 7ths, and the bass to be more authentic to certain genres of music. I'm not sure if you can change these parameters in the middle of a song. You might check this out if you can find a Ketron in a store to audition (or take a look at some of AJ's recent demos.)

Other options would be to add tensions to certain chords when you play the second verse. I.e., Cmaj7 or Cadd9 instead of C. I'm weak on music theory, not sure if this would work. Depending on the CASM (style pattern) you might get a different sound.

Activating RH harmony / ensemble aka "melody intelligence," and using strings with slow-ish attack for the 2nd voice might create an interesting effect on some ballads.

Finally, you could try using bass inversion if you're not already. Playing the chords in different inversions for the second verse, or substituting a relative minor chord can be used to force the bassline. In a lot of 70s singer-songwriter stuff, I find that a descending bassline is the 'counter-melody.' Yamahas have a mode called "AI Fingered" that's supposed to facilitate playing slash chords, 13ths, etc. You could experiment with this, and also the "AI Full Keyboard" mode. I'm not a pianist, and personally I find the latter a bit unpredictable. I'm also not sure if you can change these easily during a song (you might have to embed the chord recognition settings in registrations.)

Why not spend a few minutes experimenting, see what you get! My $.02.

I surly is very possible if you know how ..

One thing that should be noted: Many brands of arrangers have separately-defined style patterns for Major, Minor, and 7th chords. The default is that each chord type will follow the same pattern (of course changing the third and seventh scale degrees, as expected.) But you can make the patterns noticeably different when creating or editing a style.

Yamaha also provides limited support for this functionality, in a style section called the CASM. At least up through the Tyros 5 generation, you could not access all features of the CASM with the on-board Style Creator. You had to copy the style to your PC and use a 3rd party utility to create these variations based on chord type. FYI.

Roland does this very well..