^^^
I have to agree. I have the PSR-E433, and I mainly only use styles for the drums, and I play as much background as I can directly with my left hand. With my home set-up, I also have a set of bass pedals and a volume pedal. Yes, the E-433 does not have a volume pedal input, but at home, I run it through a mixer and amp, and I hook the volume pedal in line with that equipment.
Since I mainly use the styles for drums, the fact that there are only two variations is not that limiting to me. The only thing I would really like is to be able to do a fill-in without having to change variation. On the E433 (as well as the other E-series up to and including the E463), the only way to do a fill-in is to hit the variation button, which, by definition, will switch the A/B variation. My work-around is to hit the button twice to get a fill but then land back on the original variation, but Yamaha really should add a direct fill button in future updates.
The other way I use my keyboard is for multi-track recording, usually getting the "meat and potatoes" of the song recorded on-board using the E433's 6-track sequencer, and then sending the whole thing to Audacity DAW as an audio file and adding additional tracks as necessary directly onto Audacity. And again, here, the keyboards style limitations do not really limit what I want to do, as I can easily manage variations while recording different sections of a song. If there are any major style or tempo changes, I just record those sections as a separate song on the E433, then send the separate songs to Audacity, and then combine them as needed using the Audacity software.
In a couple cases, I wanted a 5/4 rock beat, which of course, does not exist on these keyboards. The is the Dave Brubeck type of jazz 5/4 style available, but that is not what I wanted. So, using the multi-track recording, I used a basic 8-beat rock beat as a basis of the drum pattern I wanted, and then, using a separate sequencer track, I manually played a cymbal every 5th beat using a drum-kit voice to "synthesize" a 5/4 rock beat.
I'll post an example of this later -- right now, I'm having trouble accessing the Box website that has my recordings.