I just picked up an EA7. My last Roland board was a G70 many years ago. I see the OS is improved over the BK series. I’m plowing thru the owner and reference manuals, but sometimes I can’t find or understand what I need to have done. Here is a list of my newbie questions:
Live, how do I change a tone in a style I’m using?
Offline, how best to reset the tones in a style? Is this a UPG?
When I want to set up a UPG, what exactly are the steps? The two screens aren’t helping me here.
Right now I identified styles for songs by their style number, but there’s got to be a quicker way.

Feel free to private message me if you’re interested in conversing.

Changing a tone in a style ‘live’ isn’t that easy. No touch screen makes navigating to the tone banks a lot harder.

To be quite honest, several of the questions seem to indicate you want to ‘old school’ your performance, selecting everything on the fly. I don’t know if you succeeded doing this well on the G70, it was pretty hard even with the touch screen, but it’s exponentially harder without one!

In these days of thousands of sounds and styles, and hundreds of effects, the old school way is just too overwhelming, and most modern arrangers get around it by getting you to use the Performance List to set up what you want for each song individually.

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘reset the tones in a style’… Do you mean revert to the sounds it originally used before you started editing it in the Makeup Tools?

UPG’s are now called Performances. Read up in the manual how to create a Performance List, and how to store a created Performance in one. You probably want to bone up on how to copy a Performance from one List to another.

I don’t know about the EA7, but on the BK-9, if you don’t fist load up a Performance List/UPS before you write a Performance, it creates a new one. So get in the habit of loading your Master List before you start work. Or a ‘works in progress’ List, whatever way you want to do it.

I find that the fastest way to create Performances is to start with a ‘template’ Performance. Create a Performance, set all your usual stuff, split point, type of chord recognition, switches and controls to whatever you mostly use, overall balance of the Style Part volumes (I tend to always push the drums and bass a hair from the factory balance, you may be okay with the stock balance with everything at 100). Basically, set up everything the way you usually use it. Now store that as ‘Template 1’ and move it to the top of the Perf. List.

Now, when working on a new song, load that first, then substitute the style you want and the lead sounds you want, and store as the name of the song. On to the next. Not sure about the EA7, but on the BK-9 there’s a ‘Save as default’ command, that sets the current Performance up as the default startup state of the arranger. You might want to use your template Performance as that, so as soon as you power up, you’ve at least got everything the main way you like. Just don’t forget to load up your working UPS/Perf. List before you store anything!

As there is no way to shortcut to a style, unlike the Favorite Tones section, numerical may be the only way if you want them on the fly. I think creating Performances is far easier. Remember, Roland Performance changes mid song are seamless, so if you need medleys with multiple styles, creating adjacent Performances in the list and simply switching them on the fly is a very acceptable way to do comp,ex changes within one song.

But the days of random everything pretty much went out the window once we started to have thousands of styles available!

Don’t worry… much of the EA7’s OS is pretty similar to the G70’s. It will come back to you.

If your style needs aren’t THAT extensive, you could always prepare Performances that call up the style, then use ‘Hold’s’ to retain your current Tones and tempos (if doing it mid-song).

Alternatively, if just changing at the end of a song, a Performance per style with typical Tones and a generic appropriate tempo.

Lastly, styles can be called up remotely via MIDI/USB. If you have an iPad or tablet, there are plenty of programs that allow you to define buttons as PC# send buttons and allow you to label them. So you could still have a curated list of favorite styles which you could call up mid-song without disturbing anything else.

I know it’s a paradigm shift to go from hand calling everything to presetting everything for each song, but as a performer, it’s amazing how much it can free you up from a ton of button pushing and allow you to fully concentrate on just playing and interacting with the audience.

And you can still have a combination of both system if you prepare different Performance Lists, one with a song specific setup per song, and another one with just generic calls for your favorite styles. P,us, at home, every time you start with a generic call, and fine tune for a specific song, it takes just a few seconds to call up the specific song List, and store what you just fine tuned into with the song name…

There are so many ways to skin a cat with the Roland’s…

BTW, you have already set up your Favorite Tones section, right? If you can’t do it for styles, at least you can do it for your RH sounds…