Hi everybody
I agree, Olly Woo does a great job teaching how to use the Style Creator. How to record and edit note events, select voices and use the mixing console to produce well-sounding patterns. He points out the features and the limitations of the onboard Style Creator. If you seriously want to dive into the world of style creation, I would strongly recommend these tutorials as a basis how to operate the Style Creator.
If your goal is to create styles that respond to your left hand chords (after all, this is what arranger playing is all about), you have to take the next step. I'm afraid, the skills needed to produce a "real" style are demanding. First, you should have a solid understanding of harmonics theory. If you enjoyed a good musical education, this knowledge is already in your DNA. If not, there are a lot of good books on this subject or other sources of information. Second, you need a thorough understanding of the inner workings of the Yamaha auto accompaniment. This is where things get hard. You need to understand:
- NTR, the note transposition rules
- NTT, the note tranposition tables
- how NTR and NTT settings work together, to create musical parts like bass lines, polyphonic pads, chord arpeggios or monophonic melody lines (drum parts are easy, no transposition needed)
This is already the hardest part, but there are even more parameters you should understand to create styles as perfect as Yamaha's styles:
- HIGH KEY, controls the direction (up/down) in which transposition will be performed
- NOTE LIMIT HIGH/LOW, this represents hard limits for pitches used in the generated pattern
- RTR, the retrigger rule, controls what will happen, if some notes of a part is still sounding, but you change the chord.
I know of only one source that really provides the information need to understand all these parameters. I'm afraid this source is only available in German. It's Reinhold Pöhnl's book "Styles & Patterns". It was published 2003 and therefore features the SFF1 style format. Nowadays Yamaha arrangers use the SFF2 format, but this is only an extension to SFF1, Reinhold's book still is 100% valid.
As you can see, creating a style from scratch is not a piece of cake, and I seriously admire those professionals creating those preset styles for Yamaha (though they won't have to use the Style Creator like us mortals). The good news is, that we have tools to creatively modify existing styles:
- Using the mixing console to revoice parts. Keep in mind that the correct workflow is: use the mixing console to revoice, THEN go to style creator to save a copy. If you launch the style creator, THEN you enter the mixing console, any edit will apply to the current style variation only.
- Using Style Assembly to combine patterns from different styles.
- Modifying the groove with the Channel Edit / Groove function.
When you start recording your own part pattern (to replace a pattern in the preset style), chances are good that you don't need to change the (CASM) paramaters above. E.g. when changing just the rhythmic pattern of a RHY part, just play the chord used in the preset style (Cmaj7 in most cases) to create your new rhythms.
So don't be afraid to try and experiment, you can't destroy anything. Olly Woo's tutorials gives you valuable insight how to record and edit patterns using the Style Creator.