The Yamaha PSR-S950 and Tyros 5 arrangers provide audio styles as well as conventional, pure MIDI-based backing styles. Audio styles replace the MIDI-based rhythm tracks with an audio track of a (human) drummer playing a kit. The remainder of the backing track is provided by MIDI. On the up side, the audio rhythm parts have more nuance and sound pretty darned good. On the down side, the audio track in a style cannot be modified or eliminated nor can they be replaced by a user’s own audio track. Whether this limitation is a quirk of the Yamaha software or a permanent feature remains to be seen.
One of the S950 audio styles is “60sSuperGroup.” I’ve been off in Pepperland trying to pull some Beatles tunes together. I kept gravitating back to 60sSuperGroup for backing, but the drum back-beat in Main Section A is so strong that it doesn’t fit with hardly anything other than the song “Ticket To Ride.” It would be great to apply the non-rhythm parts to other songs.
Time to replace the audio rhythm parts in the 60sSuperGroup audio style. Unfortunately, one must work around the limitations of Yamaha’s software. The MIDI drum style “60sVintageRock” is roughly the same tempo and its rhythm parts are your basic Mark II rock and roll — in other words a good candidate style for a mash-up.
First, I loaded 60sSuperGroup, got into Style Creator and tried copying the 60sVintageRock rhythm parts into 60sSuperGroup. No joy. Once a style is an audio style, it’s always an audio style. Further, you cannot store the audio style to an external device like a USB jump drive. Yeah, the manual says this explicitly, but it was worth a try. No need to go down that rat-hole again.
So, here’s the process that I followed. I loaded 60sVintageRock as the base style and got into Style Creator. I then copied the non-rhythm parts from 60sSuperGroup into the new style which I called “60sHybrid”. I did this for MAIN A-D, FILL IN A-D, BREAK, INTRO 1 and ENDING 1. I’m not a big fan of long preplayed intros and endings, plus I didn’t know how well the longer intros and endings would mash up. Even without these additional intros and endings, this was more than enough button pushing for one day!
Here is a side-by-side comparison of INTRO and ENDING lengths:
60sSuperGroup 60sVintageRock
------------- --------------
INTRO 1 1 1
INTRO 2 2 4
INTRO 3 5 9
INTRO 4 1 1
ENDING 1 3 3
ENDING 2 4 4
ENDING 3 5 6
ENDING 4 1 1
I’m not sure how to fix up these up as yet. Suggestions?
The two styles have different instrument-to-style part assignments. Here’s the instrument information for 60sSuperGroup:
Part Vol Pan Var Instrument ---- --- --- --- ----------------- RHY1 54 C 0 PowerKit1 OFF RHY2 72 C 0 RealDrums OFF BASS 66 C 0 Mega VintageFlat ON CHD1 51 L28 127 Mega SingleCoil ON CHD2 42 R30 127 Mega SolidGuitar2 ON PAD 48 C 0 Mega 12StringGtr ON PHR1 44 R32 127 Mega SingleCoil OFF PHR2 70 C 0 GrandPiano OFF
The rhythm channels are both OFF because all drum/percussion is provided by the audio track. Here is the instrument information for 60sVintageRock:
Part Vol Pan Var Instrument ---- --- --- --- ----------------- RHY1 54 C 0 PopLatin OFF RHY2 72 C 0 RealDrums ON BASS 66 C 0 Mega VintagePick ON CHD1 51 L28 127 Mega SteelGuitar ON CHD2 42 R30 127 Mega SolidGuitar2 ON PAD 48 C 0 CurvedBars ON PHR1 44 R32 127 Mega SingleCoil OFF PHR2 70 C 0 Harmonica OFF
Since nothing was copied to INTRO 2-4 and ENDING 2-4, the instruments and sound for these sections do not match the sections copied from 60sSuperGroup. The mismatch is readily apparent when played.
DSP1 is configured as a SYSTEM variation effect. I needed to edit the effect parameters in order to get that VOX AC30 amp chime. Here are the parameters; they are the same as 60sSuperGroup DSP1:
Category: REAL DIST Effect: ST AMP VT COMP SW ON COMP SUSTAIN 0.4 COMP LEVEL 6.0 DIST TYPE Crunch DIST DRIVE 7.8 DIST EQ Mid Boost DIST TONE 7.0 DIST PRESENCE 6.0 DIST OUTPUT 24
It’s been an interesting experiment so far! The resulting mash-up should be quite useful when tracking up-tempo, early Beatles rock and roll.