Hi Chony

A little hard to find your web site at http://simchatunes.blogspot.com/
This is the one?

Wonderful music. Just great!

Jørgen


------------------
The Unofficial YAMAHA Keyboard Resource Site

When I make my styles, I don’t make them with less than 16 measures.

That gives me a chance to very the drums and bass within the style. The loop does not sound as mechanical as a 2 or 4 measure loop. Plus it gives a live feel to it if you include some semi fills at the 8 and 16th measures.

Also, I think it is so essential to use foot pedals for fills. When you can throw in a fill for half of a measure with out making it sound like a full fill, that can make all the difference in the world and make it sound live. Especially if the last half of the fill has good drum roles and syncopation.

This issue, amongst others, is one of the reasons I like to encourage people to ask for more ARRANGER features to be developed for our keyboards, rather than taking the state of the art at the moment, and freezing it, and then adding workstation feature after feature, with no fundamental improvement in the actual arranger part....

Why can't we have more variations, more fills, more break/fills, more control over what happens after a fill, etc., etc.?

Why not allow 64 bar variations, and if a fill-to-same is pressed, jump forward to the next 16 bars of the same variation? In fact, there are very few arrangers, if any, that even have dedicated fill-to same fills, yet alone options to what happens next.

Why not have a fill dedicated to each and every transition?

Why not have a break/fill for each and every variation?

Why not have a 'swing' control for simpler 8-beat and 16-beat styles so you can vary the feel? (They used to have this one back in the day)

THESE are all fundamentally ARRANGER features, and to be honest, I've seen very little new on arrangers lately. Oh, yes, they are packing them with more and more questionably useful workstation features, HD recorders, samplers, full 16-track sequencers, dubiously useful database features, tons of non-arranger features. But where are the fundamental improvements to basic arranger technology, lately?

About the only major improvement has been the move from two variations to four, but they didn't increase the fills to allow for this enough. Roland have four Variations, but only seven fills. You need 16 to cover ALL the transitions. I would gladly trade an HD recorder for enough fills that EVERY transition is smooth and natural.

I would gladly trade a full-featured sequencer (we've ALL got computers capable of FAR better sequencing, or you wouldn't be reading this!) for longer variations and better fill-to-same rules, or a dedicated break/mute for every variation.

I don't know about you, but I've already GOT a couple of workstations. I don't need workstation features on an arranger. Where are the fundamental improvements to arrangers?

Also, to address the question of really long variations, with semi-fills pre-programmed in them, these (to me) are of questionable value. Unless the tune you play has all the fills EXACTLY where your style puts them you are no longer in control. You are almost getting into SMF country there, but WITHOUT the advantage of not having to play the chords!

I can see 8 bar styles as very useful, 16 bars without ANY fill (that YOU control), somewhat less, but OK, I can see how some tunes might work that way, but anything longer, and you are getting into 'Song/Style' territory, where the style is only really useful for the specific song it was designed for. Might as well use SMFs with Mark/Jump points (for controlling the structure) and get back your left hand!

The feature that we all REALLY need to make very long variations work is the ability to play a fill-to-same that DOESN'T reset the loop, but just 'jumps' after the fill to the next 8 or 16 bar section in the same variation. Now THAT would be a fundamental improvement in arranger functionality....

Who's going to be the first to implement it?

Hi Chony,
don't know if this would work "musically", but if you're trying to get away from the repetative nature of a style,would it work if you had tiny variations on a style track depending on whether you played, a maj, minor or 7th chord.
You've got 16 tracks to play with, so hyperthetically if you had your main drum rhythm on channel 10, possibly you could set up 2 or 3 tracks for channel 9 and have slight variations
ie setup a slightly different pattern for a minor chord, and another one for a 7th by either
adding/changing or deleting a drum instrumentinstrument, or by altering the pattern slightly. Could also be done for bass etc, depending on how many empty tracks you have in the style.

Technics did it back on the KN3000 with some of their styles. Didn't work terribly well because the differences were too great between the patterns. ie you played the major , sounded fine, you played the minor & the pattern was glaringly different.

best wishes
Rikki
[QUOTE]Originally posted by chony:
[B]

Hi Chony (and Rikki)

Good point Rikki.

Chony, I think you would like to test the method Rikki proposed.

You can read more about it at http://www.jososoft.dk/yamaha/articles/style_11.htm
(section: Chord Type dependent Accompaniment)

Hope this helps you.
Jørgen


------------------
The Unofficial YAMAHA Keyboard Resource Site

Hi Jorgen,
thank you for the link. It explains it so much better than I could have.

best wishes
Rikki

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Jørgen Sørensen:
[B]Hi Chony (and Rikki)

The only problem here is that the variations in the variation (!) are chord type triggered, so the same chord structure will STILL repeat the same pattern. It WILL be different from song to song, but within one song still be repeating....

A better solution (IMO) would be to allow velocity triggered variations, so as you play harder, the drums would not only get louder (as some arrangers allow) but also to trigger different tracks. Now place that velocity crossover point in the middle of your average playing strength, and you will ALWAYS get a different track each time you play.

Roland allow a certain amount of this capability, allowing you to switch parts on or off with velocity (as well as just make them louder/softer), but unfortunately only allow you ONE drum track, so you can only make it louder or softer. But it works well with guitar tracks, and a combination of this AND chord related pattern changes can make for a VERY non-repetitive picking or strumming pattern. Of course, it uses up Parts at an alarming rate, so with only eight style tracks, you have to keep the style very simple (at least in terms of simultaneous sounds).

But it IS one more way to squeeze variation out of shorter length patterns.

Thanks to a lot of great feedback, I think I'm pretty much convinced to go with the 16 measure variations. That's what I've been doing until now and it has worked great, so I think I'll continue that way.

Rikki, sounds like a very interesting idea. I'm going to have to think about whether I want to get my hands that dirty!

Thanks, Chony

Hi Chony,
I did actually test it, before suggesting it,( in omb.) I just created 3 drum tracks one, with bass drum, 1 with hihat & 1 with cymbals . Then set 1 track to play on maj, another min another on 7th. I wanted to make sure that they were triggering independantly, depending on the chord type.

Probably gets too complicated if you try and do variations for a lot of instruments, but you could just create drum variations for maj, min & 7ths.

Personally I haven't got the musical skill to come up with additional style tracks, I'm more into editing existing.


best wishes
Rikki