Styles, Styles, Styles!
Styles are the lifeblood of an arranger keyboard owner. Your keyboard, of course, comes with a number of preset styles built into the firmware of the keyboard. The newer and more expensive keyboards have better and more numerous styles. But, no matter how many and how great the styles included with your keyboard, eventually, a player gets used to all the standard styles and begins to yearn for something new and something different.
Of course, one of the greatest advantages of the Yamaha PSR and Tyros keyboards is the ability of users to load external styles into their keyboard as quickly and easily as they load the internal preset styles. To facilitate the use of external styles, the keyboards had, initially, floppy disk drives, then Smart Cards, and now USB connections and even internal hard drives. These storage areas can hold additional files for your keyboard, in particular, more style files!
Where Do New Styles Come From?
You Create Them!
As you become more comfortable with your keyboard, you will discover that you can modify any of the preset styles in many different ways. You can change the OTS voices used. You can even change the accompaniment voices. You can increase or decrease the default tempo and set your own, preferred, left-hand voice. Many users will "tune-up" a style with changes like this to modify it a bit to fit a particular song. The revised style can then be saved to one of the user storage areas as a "new" style. So, users themselves can create new styles by modifying the preset styles.
Others Create Them!
Unfortunately, not everyone has the talent, or the time, to tinker with styles and make their own versions. Fortunately, many folks who can modify styles have also chosen to make their versions available to others by uploading them to various internet sites. There are many such sites on the internet where you can find style files for use with Yamaha keyboards and there are, literally, thousands of these styles available for download. Some of these styles are "tuned" preset styles, some are simply copies of preset styles from earlier keyboards, some are styles taken from arranger keyboards of other manufacturers and reformatted and tuned to work on PSR and Tyros keyboards. Some are styles that have been converted from midi files and some are styles that some very talented users have created themselves entirely from scratch. And, of course, you can also find commercial sources that have created styles and will be happy to sell them to you.
PSR Tutorial Styles
If you visit the Styles section of this web site, you will find thousands of styles that you can freely download. Generally, these styles are in "zipped" files to minimize storage space and speed up download times. When downloaded, you need to unzip the file on your computer and then transfer the file to your Yamaha keyboard. Even if you have a high-speed internet connection, it can take a long time to build up your own collection of styles; if you have a slow connection, it can take a very long time. And then, you have to unzip everything.
If you don't want to bother with all that, you can simply get one of the PSR Tutorial style CDs. The first CD was put together in the fall of 2007 and included about 19,000 styles. A second CD was released early in 2009 with 16,000 additional styles and the original CD was also revised at that time. The third CD was released in August of 2010 with 15,700 styles. All the styles on these CDs are unzipped and ready for immediate use. They are also organized and indexed to help you find what you are looking for. Just copy them to your USB drive and put them in your keyboard. For a more detailed look at what is on the Style CDs, check out the links above.
New for 2010, we now have all of these styles and more on a single small USB drive. The drive is small only in size. In capacity, it holds 4GB of data. 3GB are used to hold over 80,000 styles leaving you with hundreds of additional megabytes for other resources you may want to add. If you are the proud owner of a new Yamaha arranger keyboard, this is one accessory that will keep you exploring for years.
If you are one of those that simply love to have more styles, there are enough here to keep you busy for a very long time.
Note: if you are interested in Styles CD#1, CD#2, CD#3, and CD#4 (with almost 60,000 styles) be sure to take advantage of our Styles Special under the Order CDs tab.
This page updated on January 8, 2012 .
