PSR Tutorial USB drive

[Note: For an additional $10, you can order this drive on an 8 GB USB stick. See the Order CDs page for the 8GB option.]

No matter what keyboard you have, sooner or later you are going to want more styles for your keyboard. Fortunately, the Yamaha Arranger keyboards are designed to facilitate the use of external styles. Thousands of styles are available on the internet and they can be downloaded and loaded into your keyboard. Of course, there are many thousands of styles available on the PSR Tutorial web site. Many of these are styles have been individually tuned by PSR Tutorial members to fit their particular keyboard or to fit a particular song. Other members have generously contributed their individual style collections that they have built up over they years and other's the "Gig Disks" they use for their performances.

You can get many of these styles by simply downloading them from the Styles section of this web site. Of course, the styles on the web site are compressed and stored as ".zip" files. You download the zip file, uncompress it to get to the original styles, and then you can take the styles to your keyboard and try them out. Alternatively, you can simply order any of the PSR Tutorial Style CD-ROMS and get thousands of styles already unzipped and ready to be copied to a floppy disk or a USB drive and then taken to your computer for playing. And now, you have a third alternative. This 4GB USB drive includes not only all the styles available on the site but also all the styles from the PSR Tutorial Style CD-ROMS, all the styles that have been uploaded to the PSR Tutorial Forum in the past six years and additional styles that are not available from any of those sources. All told, there are over 80,000 styles on this USB drive organized into 4,000 folders. It is a resource that will be a delight to many Yamaha owners.

Building This Collection

As you might imagine, pulling all this together was a massive chore. I started by gathering all the files from all the different pages in the PSR Tutorial Styles section. Since there are many styles in various "collections", it was inevitable that there would be duplicates. So, after everything was gathered together in an unzipped format, Peter Wierzba's PSR Style Database program was used to identify duplicate files and eliminate them. This removed some 10,000 styles from the collection. As such, the individual collections are not exact duplicates of the collections available on the site since individual files from each collection were discarded when they were available in other collections.

The second step was to compare the styles from the site with the various collections provided on the 4 style CD-ROMs. It was obvious in some cases that the collection on the CD-ROM was already included in the site collection. In other cases, individual style sets from the CD-ROMs were compared with styles in the original collection to identify duplicates and discard all of them. This is fairly easy for genre songs, but much more difficult for gig disk songs where the style is identified by a song title, or, as in many cases, by a partial song title. Finding duplicates here required a careful review of duplicate pairs to determine if the the same style was used as the base for a song title several times. Only one version would be kept and the others discarded. Of course, if the same style was the basis for several different songs, these would all be kept since the value of the gig disks is the fact that an appropriate style has been selected for that song.

After melding the CD-ROM styles with the web site styles, I gathered together all of the styles that had been uploaded to the PSR Tutorial. These are all available on the various Forum Attachment CD-ROMs. These styles sets were organized into appropriate categories, duplicates removed, and the remainder added to various collections.

Style Organization

In organizing the styles, I set up five main style groups.

• One is called "Collections" and it includes styles from the various style collections available on the site plus additional collections gathered from the CD-ROMs. There are 33,087 styles in this group.
• The next major grouping was for the "Gig Disks". These include subsections that include all the gig disks from the contributors on the main site. In addition, some of the "collectors" also had styles that were based on song names and these song-named styles were moved over to the Gig Disk section. There are 9,594 styles in this group.
• As you might expect, there is a separate group for "Yamaha" styles. These are the preset styles that were provided with the various Yamaha arranger keyboards. Three subgroups (Top-Level keyboards, Mid-Level Keyboards, and Clavinova keyboards) include individual keyboard folders with styles organized by style category. There are 6,343 styles in these subgroups.
• Also included in the "Yamaha" group is a folder called "ByGenre" with 6,512 styles. All of these, of course, duplicate styles sorted by keyboard. Here, however, styles are organized by various genre categories and, within each category, individual "style" folders. Within each style folder are all the versions of that style from the keyboards that included that style as one of the presets. For owners of the S900 and earlier keyboards, I included an SFF1 version of this genre folder with 3,862 styles that excludes all the SFF2 styles. If your keyboard can read SFF2 styles, you can safely delete the SFF1 version.
• Owners always look forward to trying out new styles that appear on new Yamaha keyboards. Unfortunately, the newer keyboards often include newer features so that the new styles do not automatically run OK on older keyboards. Fortunately, there are folks who have attempted to fix the problems so that a version of the newer styles can be run on the older keyboards. The fourth grouping of styles includes these "Conversions." In this group, you find conversions from other keyboards for use with the Yamaha keyboard (although examples of these conversions are also found in the other groups). You also find subgroups based on particular Yamaha keyboards. For example, the subgroup "For PSR-3000" includes styles from earlier and later keyboards that have been tuned to work on PSR-3000 keyboards. Of course, most of these PSR-3000-tuned styles also work perfectly fine on later keyboards. There are 21,931 styles in the Conversions group.
• The final group, labeled "Forum" has styles added to this collection from those that were uploaded to the PSR Tutorial forum. These have been aggregated and the styles rearranged to fit into standard category groupings and song-styles grouped into alphabetical folders. There are 2.397 styles in this group.

In organizing these styles, I did try to include some consistency in filenames. For example, all the filetypes are in lowercase. In major song collections, I tried to put in the correct song titles. In Bogdan's styles, I also checked the performer name as well as the song title to make sure titles were correct. Performer names were moved after the song title so that the songs would appear in appropriate alphabetical folders. In many collections I used the PSR Style database to indentify style genre's and regroup styles into appropriate categories (ballad, country, swing&jazz, etc). For several collections, after the "duplicates" were removed, I also examined the style pairs that were "related" and if two styles had the same related score as well as the same number of bytes and tempo and base style, then only one version was kept. Quite a bit of time was, in fact, spent throwing styles out of the final collection.

Folders

There are about 4,000 folders on this USB drive. There are a lot of folders because Yamaha keyboards are restricted in how many files can actually appear in a single folder. For this reason, I tried to keep most of the subfolders below 100 files. This makes it easier for both the keyboard to read in all the files and for the user when having to tab to various pages to see what files are available. Smaller folders are also easier to copy. Both your keyboard and your PC may encounter problems trying to copy a folder with with hundreds of subfolders and tens of thousands of individual files. You'll find more success by creating an empty "big" folder and then copying the individual component subfolders over in smaller groups. In copying files from the USB drive to the hard drive in my Tyros4, I found that the T4 would not copy the "Gigs" folder because there were too many files in the folder. However, when I created a Gigs folder and then tried copying all the individual subfolders over, it had no problem with that. In practice, I did create most of the folders on the T4 hard drive by connecting it directly to the USB port on my PC and copying the files directly.

Some Cautions

The first thing some users should be aware of is that not every Yamaha keyboard has a USB port and, as such, would not be able to use these files directly from this drive. If you have a PSR-2000 or a PSR-2100, you are simply out of luck. You can, of course, order the USB drive for your PC. From there, you could copy files to a floppy disk for use on your keyboard, but for doing this, you are probably better off just downloading files from the site.

Unlike the styles on a CD-ROM drive, the files on a USB drive can be changed. They can not only be loaded, but they can be revised and saved again in a new version. You can add additional files to this USB drive. But, what is most important, you can also delete files. If you make a mistake here, when you delete a file, it is gone forever. So, while you get some 80,000 styles on this drive, they are not permanent; they can disappear.

Size is a big factor. Trust me. It takes a long time to copy 80,000 styles. Making a copy of this USB drive involves hours, not minutes. So, if you are planning to copy things to your PC, be aware that it will take quite awhile to move all the files. Again, you may want to copy things in small batches.

There are SFF2 files on the drive. If you have a keyboard that can not read SFF2 files, the keyboard will balk and say that the file can not be loaded. Fortunately, there are in the Conversions section, a number of style sets that have converted some SFF2 styles to a format that can be ready by earlier keyboards. The USB drive is most valuable to owners of the newest keyboards, Tyros3 and Tyros4 as well as the PSR-S901/S710. These owners will be able to take advantage of all the files on the USB drive. Of course, if you don't have a newer keyboard yet, the USB drive will be very handy when you do decide to move up!

 

This page updated on March 13, 2012 .