Tag Archives: arpeggios

Motif styles for your arranger!

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I’m pleased to announce my collection of Motif performance styles for the Yamaha PSR-S950 arranger and its close cousins: Tyros 5, PSR-S770 and PSR-S970.

Motif and MOX are great song-writing machines with thousands of built-in musical phrases. In Motif-speak, these phrases are called “arpeggios.” Motif/MOX also have built-in “Performances” which combine these musical phrases into jam-along song starters. Although Motif-series workstations are not arranger keyboards, the Performances are fun for live jams, covering many modern genres (contemporary jazz, funk and R&B) which are underserved by arranger workstations.

To fill this gap, I translated 23 Motif performances to PSR/Tyros styles. In keeping with the original source material, these styles are stripped down and lean. No orchestration to get in the way! Some styles use only bass and drum. INTROs and ENDINGs are short and basic. Depending upon the source performance, a translated style may have only three MAIN sections. However, all styles bring the groove.

Many of the styles use Megavoice bass and guitar. Plus, I’ve added appropriate OTS voices. Of course, you’re welcome to ditch the OTS voices and replace them with your own.

Here is the link to the ZIP file: perf_for_s950.zip. The file unzips into a directory named “PERF_for_S950”. The ZIP file includes a short READ ME file with more information.

If you would like to know how I translate a Motif/MOX performance to a PSR/Tyros style, please read the following articles:

And now for something completely different

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Been a while since the last post, eh?

After the intensive push to publish courseware, I took a little “dreadlock holiday” and spent the last few months devoted to music. (Ahhh, the privileges of retirement!) In particular, I decided to deep dive into the Yamaha MOX workstation which is now my main gigging instrument. I learned to create songs using the rather wonderful library of musical phrases that are built into the MOX. I bought an iPad to use some of the many apps developed by Yamaha, including the Yamaha Mobile Music Sequencer.

As always, in the spirit of sharing what I have learned, I have published a page about getting started with the Yamaha MOX synthesizer. It describes my own journey and it is meant to complement the MOX owner’s manual. I hope that it helps you out.

Finally, I also learned a lot more about “arranger” keyboards. These keyboards ain’t your father’s Wurlitzer any more and surely have a place in professional studios as well as the home recreation room. I’ll have more to say about arranger keyboards in a future post.

On the nerd front, I took a side trip into the basics of quantum mechanics and quantum computing.

Needless to say, this all took a bit of time.