Do You Want a Drummer or Small Combo or Swing Band or Rock Group or Marching Band or a Full Orchestra to Accompany You?

Styles are at the heart of an arranger keyboard.  Select a style and you immediately have a whole band to accompany you in your playing.  In fact, you have many, many different accompanying bands available from small jazz combos to big bands to country bands to rock groups to disco dance bands to latin to whatever you need.  In this next step in the exploration of your PSR, we'll take a look at the styles available and how you call up the rest of the band to help you when you play.

Selecting a Style

Your style selection can start from the MAIN screen or from the various Style Category buttons.  From the MAIN screen, press the [D] button on the left next to the Style option window.

Note that this little STYLE window shows you not only the current style name (HeartBeat, in the picture below), but also the time signature (4/4), and the current tempo  (148).

Style Categories

On the left side of the main screen are all the style categories.  To select a style from one of the categories, simply press the category button.  For example, if you pressed the DANCE category, the STYLE window would immediately open up and you could then select the particular DANCE style that you wanted to use.

The STYLE Screen

The features of the STYLE window are similar to those of the DEMO and VOICE windows.  You notice three tabs at the upper right.  The PRESET tab is highlighted indicating that you are looking at styles stored in the preset area of memory in the PSR.  The styles you see in the PRESET area are the internal styles supplied with your keyboard. They are ALWAYS there and you can not change them or delete them. You can make a copy of the style and modify the copy, but the preset styles are fixed and always available. 

The second tab is the USER area. You can move to this tab by using the [NEXT] button. In fact, you use the [BACK] and [NEXT] buttons to move back and forth between the three tabs shown. The USER area is part of the flash memory in the PSR where you can store your own versions of files or files you have loaded from a floppy disk.  What you store in USER memory remains there even when you turn power to the keyboard off.  Be warned, however, that the amount of "memory" available to you in USER memory is very limited. The PSR-2100 has room for about one floppy disk of storage and the PSR-2000 only half of that.

The last tab is for the FLOPPY DISK and it will show you all the styles that are on the floppy disk currently in your keyboard.  (In the VOICES screen, the FLOPPY DISK tab would show you all the voices on the floppy disk in your keyboard. In the SONG screen, it would show you the midi files on the floppy disk. So, you see, the view of what you see under the FLOPPY DISK tab depends on what screen you are using when you view that tab. It never shows you ALL the files that might be stored on your floppy disk.)

The illustration above shows the first 10 styles in the DANCE category on the PSR-2100. You can tell that this is the DANCE category by the folder icon and the word "Dance" at the bottom of the 10 listed styles.  Below that are some page icons.  You are on Page 1 (P1) of the dance styles.  There are three more pages available (P2, P3, and P4).  To select any of these styles, simply press the corresponding buttons by the style name ([A] - [E] on the left and [F]-[J] on the right.).

The page options, as well as the various file options below them, are selected by pressing one of the buttons above or below the numbers (1-8) under the main window.  The "above" buttons select the various pages (P1, P2, P3, or P4).  The "below" buttons select the various file options (NAME, CUT, COPY, PASTE, DELETE, SAVE, NEW, and UP).  Since the above screen shows the PRESET area, you can not rename, cut, paste, delete, or save any files to this area, nor can you create a new folder in this area.  That is why these options are grayed out.  You can COPY the style, however.  (You could copy it to the USER area or to a FLOPPY DISK.).  You also see that the UP option is available.  If you pressed the [8B] button, this would take you up one folder.  That would display a screen showing all the available style folders.  DANCE is just one of the style categories (folders) available.  If you had pressed the LATIN category button, you would have immediately gone to the Latin folder.

PSR Style Tables

Now that you see how to select a style, the next question is what are all the styles available. If you haven't purchased your keyboard yet, you may also wonder how the various Yamaha keyboards differ in the styles that are provided. The remaining pages in this "Exploring" section will help answer these questions. PSR-2100 Styles provides you with a list of all the styles, by category, on the 2100 and 1100 models. More summary here.....

External Styles

With all those styles available in your PSR, you may think you will be able to enjoy all that variety for years. But, alas, that's often not true. Users quickly gain an appetite for more and more styles. Fortunately, as a PSR owner, you are not limited to just those styles provided with your keyboard.  If you purchased a PSR-2000, you also received a floppy disk with additional styles. (This floppy was not provided to PSR-2100 purchasers.)  To use these additional styles, you simply put that floppy disk into your keyboard and then press the [D] button to load a style.  When you see the STYLE screen, press [NEXT] twice to move to the FLOPPY DISK.  There you will see all the styles on the floppy disk and you can load any one of them just the way you load an internal style.

When you load the style, it is copied from the floppy disk to what you might think of as a clipboard in your PSR.  You can now play the style as is, adjust it as you want (change tempos, voices, etc.), in fact, you can treat that style in all respects just like it was one of the internal styles built into the PSR.  In fact, if you SAVE that floppy style to the USER area, it will always be in your keyboard and available whenever you turn the machine on just like the preset styles are always there.  Unfortunately, the USER memory area is limited and you can not save an unlimited number of styles there.  But, floppy disks are very inexpensive and you CAN save an unlimited number of styles on floppy disks.  And loading a style from a floppy is almost as quick as loading it from internal memory.

The final lesson in this section, External Styles, will introduce you to some of the different places where you can find thousands of additional styles that you can use on your PSR.