CD-ROM Contents

The information below is extracted from the index.html file on the CD-ROM. Although still a summary, it provides more information about what you will find on the disc.

This CD includes 15,700+ styles. In addition to the thousands of styles, you will find a "Utilities" folder that includes several utilities that are discussed below. The following section discusses the style sets available on this CD-ROM. ($28)

 

Style Organization

Introduction

Styles are provided in several major "collections." Each collection includes many folders and each folder includes a number of sub-folders. The styles are found in these sub-folders. Any of these folders (or groups of folders) can be copied to a USB drive and moved to your keyboard where the styles can be directly loaded and played. There are no "zip" files on the CD.

Style Selection. In putting together the styles included on this CD, Each collection's styles were compared with the styles available on the Styles CD#1 and Styles CD#2 discs. Any styles that were duplicates of styles already present on one of the earlier CDs were omitted. In addition, I also omitted any styles with less than four variations and any styles that did not include OTS.

Once all the potential styles were filtered through the earlier released CDs, I again compared the "new" set of candidate styles to make sure all the duplicates in this set were also omitted. Finally, for all the styles that made it through the above filtering, I used the PSR Style Database to examine all "related" styles and deleted any that were "related" to others by having the same file size, tempo, genre, and copyright. Because of all this "filtering" and the reorganization (see below), the style sets on this CD are not exactly like the collections available on the PSR Tutorial site. In addition, there are several thousand styles on the CD that are not available on the site at all.

Style Organization. I have tried to organize the styles by musical genre, somewhat similar to the style categories used by Yamaha. Individual keyboard conversions use the exact style categories defined by Yamaha. In larger collections, with thousands of styles, the various genres show many sub-genres. "Ballads" often include folders for 8-Beat and 16-Beat and tempo folders that divide the ballads into groups sorted by tempo. All of the various country styles are grouped together in the "Country" folder. "Ballroom" generally includes Foxtrot, Waltz, Quickstep, Pasodoble, Jive, Cha-Cha and Tango. "Latin" includes all the various latin genres such as Beguine, Bolero, Bossa, Mambo, Rumba, Salsa, Samba and Caribbean styles. In some collections, you will find a category called "Electronic" that includes Disco and the various Dance styles although in other collections Dance and Disco are shown as separate high-level folders. I have included "Pop" and "Rock" as two separate collections each with various sub-genres. "R&B" normally includes Blues, Soul, Gospel/Worship, and Rock&Roll. "Swing&Jazz" holds Bigband, Swing, and Jazz styles. "Movie&Show" are grouped together as are "March&Polka." Finally, you will find a "World" category where various country and ethnic styles can be found. While styles have sometimes been moved to the appropriate genres, no effort has been made to standardize or change the style names used.

All of the subfolders have been organized so that the have fewer than 200+ styles so that they can be read from the keyboard itself. (If a folder has too many styles, the keyboard can not read that folder although your PC has no such problem.)

PSR-S900 Conversions

The styles are grouped into various style "collections". The styles in the PSR-S900 folder have been converted specifically for that keyboard, but they will sound fine, as is, on other keyboards. These styles include a number of "original" style sets (PSR-3000, PSR-9000, 9000Pro, Tyros1, Tyros2, CVP409) converted to the S900. It also includes Onacimus' Standard Style set and Mega style sets converted for the S900. These conversions combined styles from Yamaha keyboards without Mega voices (Standard set) and subsequent keyboards with mega voices (Mega set) for use with the 3000. For those of you who like Gig disk styles, styles named after a particular song, I have included Gary Diamond's gig disks, which have been very popular, converted for use with the S900. There are 3,752 styles in this collection.

Bogdan Hoecvar's Conversions (3k)

Bogdan is well known for his style conversions. He uses One Man Band to convert midi files into style files and, in so doing, has produced hundreds of new and unique styles. These styles are named after the song and usually include the performer's name and the key of the song. The songs listed alphabetically and provided in four folders: A-F, G-L, M-R, and S-Z. There are 409 styles in Bogdan's conversions.

Chris Easdown's Collection

Chris currently plays on the Tyros3, but he has had a Tyros2, Tyros1, and PSR-740 and so has been collecting styles for many years. This is his "Tyros1" style collection. All of these styles were tuned to sound good on the Tyros1. I have tested many on the Tyros3 and they also sound terrific there. In copying Chris's collection there were several hundred styles eliminated because they were available on our earlier CDs. However, you will still find 2,207 styles in Chris' collection.

Eileen Lowry's Styles

Eileen currently plays the Tyros3 and is looking forward to the Tyros4. She is a long-time Yamaha fan and has owned all the previous Tyros models. She also is well-known for her style "tweaking", which includes fixing up many styles converted from other keyboards to sound good on Yamaha's keyboards. This collection from Eileen are styles she has tuned for the Tyros1 and Tyros2 models. They will also play well on the Tyros3. You will find 846 styles in Eileen's collection.

Henni's Conversions

Henni, a PSR-3000 owner, has spent countless hours converting styles from a wide variety of sources for use on his PSR-3000. I have combined all of the collections from Henni, which are on the site, into one large collection with all the styles organized by genre. There are 3,020 styles in Henni's collection.

Jeff's Collection

Jeff is simply a "collector" and not a "tuner" of styles. His styles have come from many varied sources. I have combined all of these into one large collection and organized them into our standard genre categories. You will find quite a large collection of rock styles in this set. There are 2,828 styles in Jeff's collection.

John Vernon's Collection

John's collection on this CD is smaller than the one on the PSR Tutorial site since it excluded the styles with fewer variations and those without OTS. In addition, I have resorted the style set to put the styles in categories similar to all the other categories used on this CD. Still, there are 2,329 styles in John's collection.

Onacimus Sayaham's Conversions

Onacimus is noted for his pain-staking and detailed conversions of Yamaha styles sets. His conversions are normally for the PSR-3000 and he goes out of his way to make sure the converted styles sound as much as possible like the original. You'll find his Standard (603 styles) and Mega (611 styles) conversions in the PSR-S900 folder. In this folder are his latest conversions which include his conversions of the 9000Pro styles for the 3k and the start of his Tyros3 and CVP509 conversions (the MegaPlus set) for the 3k. There are 343 styles in these new conversions.

Utilities

PSR Styles Database

Copy this CD to hard drive and the PSR Style Database by Peter Wierzba can be used to read the entire collection or any part of it. You can use it to catalog your styles and see exactly what you've got. You can list all the styles and sort them by name or by folder or by tempo or by size or by whether they have OTS or not. You can use the "filter" option to, for example, find all of the "beguine" styles in the collection and move them all to a folder of your choice. Anyone with a large collection of style files, and that now includes you, will find this a very handy program.

MIDIPlayer

MIDIPlayer by Michael Bedesem not only plays midi files, it can also be used to load and play style files. Not only that, it can convert a style made for one PSR keyboard so that it can be used on another PSR keyboard. Thus, if you have the PSR-3000, you can still take advantage of any of the styles that may be listed under TYROS.

Tyros2 Converter

If you have a Tyros2, Yamaha has conveniently supplied the Tyros2 Converter program. It can be used to convert Tyros (and PSR9000) files for use with the Tyros2 keyboard. The PSR3000 files are similar to Tyros and the converter program will also convert those programs. The program adjusts the OTS voices, and perhaps some of the accompaniment voices, to use the voices that are available on the Tyros2.

Tyros2 Voice Converter

The Tyros2 Voice Converter by Yamaha is used to convert styles, midis, etc. from the Tyros2 to the CVP and PSR (where CVP means CVP-409/407/405/403/501 and PSR means PSR-S900/S700/OR700). It also converts styles from the CVP & PSR to the Tyros2. The Tyros2 voice converter was used to convert many styles that were formatted for the Tyros2 into a PSR-S900 format. These styles are found in the PSR-S900 folder. Most of these styles will sound fine if played on a Tyros2 or a Tyros3.

File Converter for Tyros3

This is yet another Yamaha utility that will convert Tyros2 files for use on the new Tyros3 keyboard. Unfortunately, there is no converter that will convert Tyros3 styles for use on earlier keyboards.

 

Have Fun Exploring!

Arranger keyboard players always love to get more styles. Just trying out all the styles here will take anyone a very long time! Nobody really needs 16,000 styles, but a several hundred really good ones would be really useful. However, what is "good" depends on the player -- beauty is in the eyes (and ears) 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.

Joe Waters

20 August 2010

This page updated on January 8, 2012 .