CD-ROM Contents

The information below is extracted from the Read Me file on the CD-ROM. Although still a summary, it provides more information about what you will find on the disc.

Style Utilities

This CD has approximately 16,000 styles on it. In addition to the thousands of styles, you will find a "Utilities" folder that includes several essential utilities. These utilities are discussed below. The following section will discuss the styles available on this CD-ROM. ($28)

PSR Styles Database

The PSR Styles Database by Peter Wierzba can be used to read the entire CD or any part of it. You can use it to catalog your styles and see just what you've got. You can list all the styles and sort them by name or by folder or by tempo or by size or by whether they have OTS or not. You will find this a very handy program.

The PSR Styles Database can be used to dump information to a CSV file that can be imported into Excel. I've done that to produce an index file (Excel_index.txt) showing all the styles on the CD-ROM saved in CSV format. That file, which isn't easily readable as a text file, was then imported into Excel, reformatted a bit and saved as Excel_index.xls. I used that file to produce an Excel file with an index of Genre and SongStyle files by folder and another Excel file with an index sorted alphabetically by filename. Both of these have also been saved as web pages so they can be viewed with your browser. Note that these are very large files and it may take a while for your browser to read in the whole file. Do not be anxious to immediately print out these files -- with the many thousands of records in these files, you would generate a very long printout. Better to simply view the file online in your browser if you are looking for a particular style.

MIDIPlayer

MIDIPlayer by Michael Bedesem not only plays midi files, it can also be used to load and play style files. Not only that, it can convert a style made for one PSR keyboard so that it can be used on another PSR keyboard. Thus, if you have the PSR-3000, you can still take advantage of any of the styles that may be listed under TYROS. Simply load the styles into MIDIplayer and set the target instrument to be PSR-3000. Using the batch facility, you can now copy all those files from a "Tyros" folder, convert them to PSR-3000 format, and store them in a folder of your choice. (That folder, of course, would have to be somewhere on your hard drive where you can save files. You can not write to or alter any of the files on this CD-ROM.) Voices that are unique to the Tyros are converted to similar voices on the PSR-2000. This is essential for "Mega" voices. You can also use this program to automatically add OTS settings to styles that do not have OTS included. If you load a particular set of styles in your keyboard and find that they are all too "quiet" for your keyboard, you can use Michael's Midiplayer to automatically increase the volume of all the styles to a higher setting.

Note: the full version of MidiPlayer 7.16 is included. Michael Bedesem periodically updates his software and you can get the latest update by downloading any update file, if you already have the full version. You have the full version on this CD, so all you would need is the update.

Tyros2 Converter

If you have a Tyros2, Yamaha has conveniently supplied the Tyros2 Converter program. It can be used to convert Tyros (and PSR9000) files for use with the Tyros2 keyboard. The PSR3000 files are similar to Tyros and the converter program will also convert those programs. The program adjusts the OTS voices, and perhaps some of the accompaniment voices, to use the voices that are available on the Tyros2. You can convert many of the styles on this CD if you have a Tyros2.

Tyros2 Voice Converter

The Tyros2 Voice Converter by Yamaha is used to convert styles, midis, etc. from the Tyros2 to the CVP and PSR (where CVP means CVP-409 / 407 / 405 / 403 / 501 and PSR means PSR-S900 / S700 / OR700). It also converts styles from the CVP & PSR to the Tyros2. If you have an S900, use the Tyros2 converter to make a Tyros2 version of the style and then the Tyros2 Voice converter to make a version for your PSR-S900.

Tyros3 File Converter

This is yet another Yamaha utility that will convert Tyros2 files for use on the new Tyros3 keyboard. Unfortunately, there is no converter that will convert Tyros3 styles for use on earlier keyboards.

Style Organization

Genre Styles

The styles that come with your keyboard are organized into style categories that generally match a particular music genre, such as Country, Latin, Swing&Jazz, Blues etc. Styles that are named after a particular type of music are found in the folder called "Genre". There are over 9,600 styles available under that folder and the various subfolders.

Song Styles

Many players like to tune a style for a particular song. They may be using one of the original preset styles on the keyboard or that style may have been altered to have different one-touch setting voices and, very often, a different tempo. The "adjusted" style is then saved with a filename that matches the song that the style was meant for. On our web site, these styles are found under the various "Gig" disk collections. On this CD, these styles are all found under the "SongStyles" folder, which includes about 6,600 song-styles. In some cases, a style "name" is abbreviated and very short abbreviations may have represented a song or a genre style so I have had to make some guesses on where to put that style. I also may have made errors in dividing a style between song-style versus genre style when the filename was not English. Some of you may easily recognize these styles, but my languages capabilities are severely lacking!

Style Collections

The styles are grouped into various style "collections". When the styles originated from a particular keyboard, for example the CVP409 or the PSRS-900, that is an obvious "collection" and there are folders under Genre labeled for those keyboard sets. Other styles may be converted from other keyboards for use on a new keyboard. Onacimus Sayaham (OS) has painstakingly converted styles from many Yamaha keyboards for use on the PSR3000. The latest versions of his conversions are in the "3kMega OS" folder and the "3kStan OS" folder. In general, the "Standard" set include Yamaha keyboards that came before the 3000 and the "Mega" set include keyboards that came after the 3000 and have Mega voices.

Some people have been very active in "tuning" styles and making new versions or converting styles from other arranger keyboards for use on the Yamaha keyboards. Brian Miles (BM) and Eileen Lowry (EL) have tuned a great many styles that are found here. Henni (HR) has also actively modified a large number of files and both he and Brian have provided versions of the new Tyros3 styles. Other folks don't always modify the styles, but rather just "collect" styles from various sites on the Internet. John Haddleton (JH), Harry (HT), and Jeff (JS) have accumulated very large collections. Bart has collected quite a few styles and set about deriving his own naming convention to save styles by genre. Tom (TG) donated his massive Gig disk library to the PSR Tutorial last year and it is on this CD. In addition to individual collections, I have also added a more diverse collection -- styles uploaded to the PSR Tutorial forum over the past several years.

Style Duplicates

As you might expect, all of these various collections included styles that were available in other collections. In addition, I did not want to include styles that already appeared in the first PSR Tutorial Styles CD. So, a good deal of effort has gone into finding and eliminating duplicate styles. Much of this eliminating has been facilitated by using the PSR Style database discussed above.

The first step for each collection was to use the PSR Style database to identify duplicates in that collection and eliminate them. Usually, each collection did, in fact, have duplicate styles, usually under different file names.

The next step was to compare the styles in each collection with the styles that are available on CD1 so styles that were on that CD could also be eliminated. In making this comparison, it was useful to divide the style on CD1 into song styles and genre styles. "Duplicates" under song styles were OK, since a single style might have been used for two different songs. Both of the song titles were kept. Also, if a song style was a duplicate of a genre style, both the song style and genre style would be OK. Under Genre, however, I wanted to remove all duplicates and could do so automatically. That was not possible under Song styles since every duplicate pair had to be examined individually to see if the song titles were different.

With duplicates from CD1 eliminated, the style collection could then be added to the new CD2. However, after the first batch of files were added, each subsequent batch had to be compared to what was already on CD2 to make sure duplicates on CD2 were also eliminated. In doing this comparison, thousands of styles were deleted.

The PSR Styles database identifies "Related" styles as well as "Duplicate" styles. After all duplicates were eliminated, I then checked "related" styles and discovered quite a few styles that sure seemed like duplicates -- they had the same name, more or less, the same tempo, and the exact same file size. I spot checked some of these style pairs with MidiPlayer and, sure enough, the OTS was the same and they sounded the same. Now there may still have been some subtle differences, but I eliminated these related files (when the file size was identical) as well. Unfortunately, there was no easy way to select a big batch or "related" files in the PSR Styles database -- every pair had to be examined one by one. I have tried to eliminate as many duplicate files as possible. I'm sure there are still some styles that are so close that one or the other could be eliminated, but I think I've reached the stage of diminishing returns!

Style Naming

I have tried to standardized the style naming to some extent as well. The style extensions have all be set to lowercase, i.e. ".sty" instead of ".STY". For genre styles, I have eliminated spaces in the style name and used capital letters to identify specific words, i.e. "EnglishWaltz" instead of "English Waltz" or "ENGLISH WALTZ". Where a particular collection had several versions of a style, numbers were used to distinguish versions, i.e. "Tango1.sty", "Tango2.sty". Sometimes different versions had icon numbers to distinguish them, but numbers were often added anyway. To facilitate comparing styles and deciding which to eliminate, I have appended an abbreviation at the end of each style name to indicate the collection. For personal collections or converters, the abbreviations were the persons initials (e.g. "SM" for Stephen Molnar). Styles that came from the forum attachments are labeled as "FA". Keyboard abbreviations are also fairly obvious. "PA" is for PA80, "G7" for G70, K6 and K7 for those Technics models. Song names use a Title format with each letter capitalized. For some collections spaces have also been eliminated, e.g. "DeepPurple", but this is not done for many of the big collections. It is easy to eliminate the spaces automatically with a file renaming utility, but it is not so easy to put them back. Some song titles also include an artist name, which is usually shown separated from the title with a double dash, e.g. "Close To You--Carpenters JH.sty".

Variations and OTS

All of the styles on the CD-ROM have 4 variations. Many of the collections included styles that had fewer variations, but they were not included. Almost 14,000 styles have OTS settings. That leaves a couple thousand styles, many for the PSR9000, that do not have OTS. Of course, users can always add their own OTS to any of these styles as well.

1 February 2009

This page updated on March 13, 2012 .