When the keyboards first came out there was so much that could be added; most came from the organs. I remember talking with some of my friends who played Kn7000 --- the feelings were the same. “What else could they possibly add?” Making new upgrades become difficult.
I must admit that the Ketron Event has my interest. The price?????

I sold my Korgpa4x and bought a Yamaha sx900. My reason for changing? My needs were no longer the same. I play at home, and I just celebrated my 91st birthday. I wanted an easy-to-play and sweeter sounding keyboard. The O.S. on the sx900 has many of the same features as the Kn7000.

All this to say --- We have desires,
but they are not all the same.
John C.

Sadly, although we have access to thousands of styles, many of them converted from other brands, the pace of creation of styles for the CURRENT models has pretty much dried up. You tend to only get impressive new styles along with a new model, and those often leverage new sounds and kits or features like new guitar modes or multiple drum tracks, and can’t play on older models.

Then there’s the issue of taking older styles and converted styles and editing them to be as impressive as the best of the new batch. That usually involves quite a bit of editing to get drum kits to hit the sweet spot of sample crossover, and a fair bit of rebalancing styles and inserting effects correctly (if you even can use inserted effects on style parts), and dealing with note ranges and wraparound. And don’t get me started about translating one brand’s guitar mode to another’s!

For me, the goal is consistency… if one style blows me away, I want them ALL to blow me away. Sadly, I seldom get that from legacy styles and conversions. The new model arrangers latest always raise the bar!

For me I spend a lot of time remixing, rebalancing and finding ways of manipulating a style.

Some say the older styles are better programmed, alot of styles can be way to busy. For me generic styles offer more flexibility than just using song styles.

While older styles tend to be a lot more generic and general purpose (personally, I hate songstyles. I’d much prefer a decent SMF or audio track if I want to sound really close to the original), they tend to be quite weak in the guitar programming and dynamic sound or the drum kit, because most of them come from an era before guitar modes and multiple level drum samples.

Back in the day, there was very little difference between a high velocity drum part with the volume turned down, and a low velocity drum part with the volume turned up. One sample per drum sound… Nowadays, with drum sounds like snare and Tom’s with four or more samples per sound, where the velocity and volume sit becomes critical. Most of the older styles I occasionally use had to have a ton of time editing spent n them to get the same level of dynamics as the latest styles.

In fairness, Roland (until they quit making TOTL arrangers) tended to have fewer recognizable songstyles than most, but it has become a disturbing trend with Yamaha and Korg.

One trick I have used from time to time to spruce up an old generic style is to replace the guitar parts with a ‘borrowed’ guitar part from another similar but current style, which should be a lot better with the modern guitar modes.

I have to confess, having done some style editing on Korg’s, I’m not sure I’d bother much, as Korg don’t have a global way to mess with velocity dynamics on individual drums, you have to do it not only on each variation, but also on each CV (chord variation). That’s an insane amount of work just to do something like bring up the velocity on the snare and lower its volume!

Korg need to copy Roland’s Makeup Tools editing system. This is a one step process for an entire style with a Roland… The easier you make something, the more likely the players will use it!

Think is a lot of people focus on the master / Global Eq to make their keyboards sound better. When it’s individual sounds that might need adjusting. Trap I feel into was to solo tracks and adjust the Eq for each part.

When in re this should be done with the style playing same with balancing the parts for the style and what your actually playing.

I have thousands of song specific, custom, style files on hand, many of which sound fantastic to say the very least. As for the guitars, they can be individually tuned, then saved in the style, thus replacing the one that is in the original, thereby providing a significant improvement in the overall style sound. Many of Yamaha's and other manufacturers onboard styles are a bit too busy, but fortunately we have the ability to mute any of those segments of the style, then save it as a user file that can be instantly accessed with a single touch of a button on the Music Finder Directory or registration. All of this is so very easy and can be accomplished on most TOTL arranger keyboards. No tablets, PCs or special software needed!

I still have my trusty Yamaha S-950, I have replaced a few buttons, still using the original keypads, and thousands of music jobs, endless hours of playing at home, it works, and sounds, as good as the day it came out of the box. Really no reason to upgrade.

Here's a classic example of an onboard style that I modified the OTS guitar voice to perform The Wreck Of The Edmond Fitzgerald

Here's another that I modified for the song Black Velvet. In this style, both the drums and guitar were modified and saved into the style.

More often than not, just utilizing the variations of any style file can make a huge difference. The lower variations frequently allow you to highlight your vocals, while at the same time providing you with beautiful, simplistic backing. A good example of this is the onboard style I used for Annie's Song. I changed variations to "C" for the bridge, then went back to the "A" variation to finish out the song. Most of MY audiences loved anything John Denver, which made life easy for me.

As I stated earlier, all of these things can be done on most TOTL and mid range arranger keyboards. For me, updating from my old S-950 was out of the question. I only wish I would have held up, physically, as well as the keyboard did. The keyboard was easily and inexpensively repaired, while in my case, they removed a lot of body parts and some never got replaced.

Good luck,

Gary

Very good, Gary. I am ashamed to say I never have tried modifying any style except for normal balancing. Thanks for posting. I will try it.

Bernie

I have all my styles on a SD card. They are listed according to who sent them.
Gary’s styles are listed with the name of the song that he is playing. When I get a new song, I go to Gary’s list first --- and then modify it. (if needed)

John C.

The trouble I have with busy styles is, muting a part isn’t what you actually WANT to do. You want a simpler part. Muting a busy guitar part doesn’t get you a simple guitar part. Just no guitar part at all…

That’s where swapping in guitar parts from other, simpler styles works well.

That’s one of the reasons I am so enthusiastic about Korg’s new 2 styles at a time system. To swap in and out parts from other styles, you basically have to go through the whole aditing procedure before you even got to hear how well they work together before now. But Korg’s system allows you to hear the results at least with two at a time without any editing at all..! An excellent way of checking out whether parts groove with each other, or whether you’re going to have to spend quite a bit of time in the quantization and micro editing section to match grooves.

I have to youtube the 5X. I wasn't aware you could swap elements of a style (vs being stuck with just 2 styles), like the old VA morphing feature, which was brilliant and lots of fun. That would definitely be a game changer.