Contents

All of the styles in this collection are available on the Styles Library that was introduced in January, 2012.

The full collection includes 16,727 files and requires 670 MB of disk space. The zipped download option uses 12 files and requires 196 MB of disk space.

(February 2009) Styles Collection #2 includes 16,000+ styles, none of which are duplicates of styles on Styles Collection #1. There are 9,600+ genre styles and over 6,600 song-styles. All of the styles in this collection include four variations; 85% of the styles include OTS. Utility files are included that allow you to convert styles from one Yamaha keyboard for use on another Yamaha keyboard. All of these styles can also be loaded and played in Yamaha arranger keyboards introduced after 2009.

Genre Styles

The styles that come with your keyboard are organized into style categories that generally match a particular music genre, such as Country, Latin, Swing&Jazz, Blues etc. Styles that are named after a particular type of music are found in the folder called "Genre". There are over 9,600 styles available under that folder and the various subfolders.

Song Styles

Many players like to tune a style for a particular song. They may be using one of the original preset styles on the keyboard or that style may have been altered to have different one-touch setting voices and, very often, a different tempo. The "adjusted" style is then saved with a file name that matches the song that the style was meant for. On our web site, these styles are found under the various "Gig" disk collections. Here, these styles are all found under the "SongStyles" folder, which includes about 6,600 song-styles. In some cases, a style "name" is abbreviated and very short abbreviations may have represented a song or a genre style so I have had to make some guesses on where to put that style. I also may have made errors in dividing a style between song-style versus genre style when the filename was not English.

Style Collections

The styles are grouped into various style "collections". When the styles originated from a particular keyboard, for example the CVP409 or the PSRS-900, that is an obvious "collection" and there are folders under Genre labeled for those keyboard sets. Other styles may be converted from other keyboards for use on a new keyboard. Onacimus Sayaham (OS) has painstakingly converted styles from many Yamaha keyboards for use on the PSR3000. The latest versions of his conversions are in the "3kMega OS" folder and the "3kStan OS" folder. In general, the "Standard" set include Yamaha keyboards that came before the 3000 and the "Mega" set include keyboards that came after the 3000 and have Mega voices.

Some people have been very active in "tuning" styles and making new versions or converting styles from other arranger keyboards for use on the Yamaha keyboards. Brian Miles (BM) and Eileen Lowry (EL) have tuned a great many styles that are found here. Henni (HR) has also actively modified a large number of files and both he and Brian have provided versions of the new Tyros3 styles. Other folks don't always modify the styles, but rather just "collect" styles from various sites on the Internet. John Haddleton (JH), Harry (HT), and Jeff (JS) have accumulated very large collections. Bart has collected quite a few styles and set about deriving his own naming convention to save styles by genre. Tom (TG) donated his massive Gig disk library to the PSR Tutorial last year and it is on this CD. In addition to individual collections, I have also added a more diverse collection -- styles uploaded to the PSR Tutorial forum over the past several years.

Style Duplicates

As you might expect, all of these various collections included styles that were available in other collections. In addition, I did not want to include styles that appeared in the first PSR Tutorial Styles collection. So, a good deal of effort has gone into finding and eliminating duplicate styles. Much of this eliminating has been facilitated by using the PSR Style database discussed above.

The first step for each collection was to use the PSR Style database to identify duplicates in that collection and eliminate them. Usually, each collection did, in fact, have duplicate styles, usually under different file names.

The next step was to compare the styles in each collection with the styles that were available in Styles #1 so styles that were on that first collection could also be eliminated. In making this comparison, it was useful to divide the style in Styles #1 into song styles and genre styles. "Duplicates" under song styles were OK, since a single style might have been used for two different songs. Both of the song titles were kept. Also, if a song style was a duplicate of a genre style, both the song style and genre style would be OK. Under Genre, however, I wanted to remove all duplicates and could do so automatically. That was not possible under Song styles since every duplicate pair had to be examined individually to see if the song titles were different.

With duplicates from Styles #1 eliminated, the style collection could then be added to the new collection (Styles #2). However, after the first batch of files were added, each subsequent batch had to be compared to what was already on Styles #2 to make sure duplicates in Styles #2 were also eliminated. In doing this comparison, thousands of styles were deleted.

The PSR Styles database identifies "Related" styles as well as "Duplicate" styles. After all duplicates were eliminated, I then checked "related" styles and discovered quite a few styles that sure seemed like duplicates -- they had the same name, more or less, the same tempo, and the exact same file size. I spot checked some of these style pairs with MidiPlayer and, sure enough, the OTS was the same and they sounded the same. Now there may still have been some subtle differences, but I eliminated these related files (when the file size was identical) as well. Unfortunately, there was no easy way to select a big batch or "related" files in the PSR Styles database -- every pair had to be examined one by one. I have tried to eliminate as many duplicate files as possible. I'm sure there are still some styles that are so close that one or the other could be eliminated, but I think I've reached the stage of diminishing returns!

Style Naming

I have tried to standardized the style naming to some extent as well. The style extensions have all be set to lowercase, i.e. ".sty" instead of ".STY". For genre styles, I have eliminated spaces in the style name and used capital letters to identify specific words, i.e. "EnglishWaltz" instead of "English Waltz" or "ENGLISH WALTZ". Where a particular collection had several versions of a style, numbers were used to distinguish versions, i.e. "Tango1.sty", "Tango2.sty". Sometimes different versions had icon numbers to distinguish them, but numbers were often added anyway. To facilitate comparing styles and deciding which to eliminate, I have appended an abbreviation at the end of each style name to indicate the collection. For personal collections or converters, the abbreviations were the persons initials (e.g. "SM" for Stephen Molnar). Styles that came from the forum attachments are labeled as "FA". Keyboard abbreviations are also fairly obvious. "PA" is for PA80, "G7" for G70, K6 and K7 for those Technics models. Song names use a Title format with each letter capitalized. For some collections spaces have also been eliminated, e.g. "DeepPurple", but this is not done for many of the big collections. It is easy to eliminate the spaces automatically with a file renaming utility, but it is not so easy to put them back. Some song titles also include an artist name, which is usually shown separated from the title with a double dash, e.g. "Close To You--Carpenters JH.sty".

Variations and OTS

All of the styles in this second set (Styles #2) have 4 variations. Many of the collections included styles that had fewer variations, but they were not included. Almost 14,000 styles have OTS settings. That leaves a couple thousand styles, many for the PSR9000, that do not have OTS. Of course, users can always add their own OTS to any of these styles as well.

Arranger keyboard players always love to get more styles. Of course, one can always get too much of a good thing! Just trying out all the styles here would take anyone a very long time! Nobody needs 16,000 styles, but a couple hundred really good ones would be really useful. However, what is "good" really depends on the player (beauty is in the eyes of the beholder). Some people like a full big band sound, others prefer a small combo sound. Some like the strong rhythm and beat of rock music, others prefer the soft background music of a lounge piano, and others want to belt out a country song. Some players only use one-finger chords and don't use the left-hand voice; others always turn on the left hand voice and use fingered chords. Hopefully, everyone, will find things that suit their interest in this collection and be able, over time, to develop that set of "really good" styles that they use all the time.

 

This page updated on March 22, 2013 .