Here’s a Yamaha PSR-S950 style for funky jazzers — SmoothItOver.

As some of you know, many of the Motif/MOX arpeggios are based on what once were PSR/Tyros arranger keyboard styles. SmoothItOver is a little payback going the other way.

The MOX has about a dozen or so jazzy/funky Performances that are fun to jam to. One of my favorites is called “Smooth It Over.” A MOX/Motif Performance is a four instrument mini-mix where each instrument can be driven by a different arpeggio (musical phrase). Arpeggios are triggered by hitting one or more notes on the keyboard. Many of the arpeggios respond to and follow chords. A musician can lay down a song or groove by switching through groups of arpeggios and playing along.

The SmoothItOver performance on the MOX splits the keyboard into a lower and an upper part. (Sound familiar?) The lower part of the keyboard triggers drum and bass arpeggios as well as directly sounding the notes played, using a mellow electric piano voice. The upper part of the keyboard is for melody and is configured with a growl tenor sax. The drum and bass arpeggios are taken from the 70sDiscoFunk and GospelFunk styles.

The PSR/Tyros SmoothItOver style rips off, errr, builds on the equivalent sections from the 70sDiscoFunk and GospelFunk styles. I added OTS buttons with the FunkGtr 16Bt3 Multi Pad bank. Be sure to throw in the Multi Pad guitars when playing. (These Multi Pads follow the left hand chords.) It really kicks the PSR/Tyros style up a notch over the MOX version. The ability to switch melody voices on-the-fly through OTS is another advantage over the MOX.

The INTROs and ENDINGs are little lame since this style is built for jamming and practice, not covers. Try it with a minor blues (e.g., Dm7, Gm7, Am7) and switch between sections frequently to vary the groove. Drop a little guitar via the Multi Pad buttons. Have fun!

Don’t let anyone kick sand in your face at the beach just because you play “an arranger.”

BTW, I know someone will ask, “Why not transfer phrase data, etc. from the MOX to the PSR?” Two good reasons:

• The MOX/Motif instruments are programmed much differently than similar PSR/Tyros instruments. The bass in Smooth It Over, for example, lays out the sound elements in different MIDI velocity and note ranges.
• The note transposition rules and tables are hidden on the MOX.

It’s much easier to start out with the native style data on the PSR than to re-map the MOX phrase data to PSR instruments and recreate all of the note transposition programming.

Here’s an arpeggio-to-style section correspondence table:

    Type  ARP#  Style section
    ----  ----  ---------------------
    Drum  ARP1  MB_Gospel Funk
    Drum  ARP2  MA_Gospel Funk
    Drum  ARP3  MB_Gospel Funk
    Drum  ARP4  FA_Gospel Funk
    Drum  ARP5  FB_Gospel Funk
    Drum  ARP6  BA_Gospel Funk

    Bass  ARP1  FA_70sDiscoFunk _XS
    Bass  ARP2  FB_70sDiscoFunk _XS
    Bass  ARP3  MB_Gospel Funk _XS
    Bass  ARP4  MB_Gospel Funk _XS
    Bass  ARP5  FA_70sDiscoFunk _XS
    Bass  ARP6  BA_Gospel Funk