Most of what I’ve seen and heard of Korg’s new feature has been fairly crude efforts. Basically some demonstrator picking a couple of quite different styles and simply playing both. Usually something old-ish and something electronica/EDM. Not quite grasping the benefits of two styles together.

But I see it as more a way to get fairly SIMILAR styles, and then start muting one of the parts in each… If you’ve got six style Parts in each, the number of different combinations is six times six, right? 36 different styles out of two! And a different style for just one of the two is yet ANOTHER 36…. Essentially it squares your style collection!

However, Korg’s initial implementation of the feature does need some refinements. A way to select which Intros, Endings and Fills will play is needed, and a way to override Fill length if one style’s fills are longer/shorter than another. Plus, some sort of rudimentary clock ‘swing’ you could apply to either style to get the basic ‘groove’ similar for both would be extremely useful.

Korg have created a gem, it just needs polishing. Let’s hope the users quickly grasp the usefulness and start to request the final pieces of the puzzle. Yamaha UK recently released a video trying to address how song specific some of their styles can be. Their solution is to basically just start muting the most recognizable Parts of the style. But Korg’s solution is FAR better. Instead of muting e.g. the record specific guitar Part, and end up with a style with no guitar Part (how is THAT an improvement?!) with Korg’s system you simply load up another style with a less song specific guitar Part and have that play instead.

Genius!

Mind you it took almost 20 years before most manufacturers not only realized the usefulness of Roland’s live chord sequencer, but finally started to improve it, first with storable sequences linked to a registration (Roland came up with storable CS’s first, but forgot to add the Registration/Performance Link, thus crippling the idea!), but now Yamaha have an 8 section CS, so you can restructure and repeat sections WITHIN the song at will, storable and linkable.

Let’s hope Korg (and everyone else!) realize the potential of their new feature much faster! It truly is the end of ‘style fatigue’ without resorting to endless tedious editing of styles. We’ve been able to hand assemble ‘mix and match’ styles for quite a while, but, trust me, it’s a VERY long and tedious process, enough to discourage most players from doing it.

Korg found a brilliant shortcut, and should be strongly encouraged to get it to the finish line ASAP.