4,800 Styles for Your Yamaha!

All "Arranger Keyboards" include internal styles that the performer can use while playing the keyboard. These styles are keyboard specific, that is, a style in a Roland keyboard is designed for that keyboard and sounds best when played in that keyboard. Sometimes, styles may be compatible between the keyboards of the manufacturer. For example, many Yamaha styles are, more or less, interchangeable among Yamaha keyboards. All the Yamaha keyboards use the same XG voice set upon which the styles are built. The introduction of Yamaha's "mega" voices upset this pattern. Styles from "newer" keyboards no longer work fine on older keyboards, which do not have "mega" or "super articulation" voices.

While styles from the arranger keyboards of other manufacturers are not directly compatible with the Yamaha PSR or Tyros series, it sometimes is possible to "convert" a style for use on the Yamaha. You can find software on the market that will read a style file from one keyboard and convert it to an appropriate format for a keyboard of a different manufacturer. Thus, a Roland style can be converted to a format that allows you to load it into a Yamaha. Style conversion, however, is NOT perfect. I have seen "conversions" where all the accompaniment voice volumes were set to the same level and all the styles were given a default tempo of 120. The resulting "converted" styles loaded into the PSR, but they did not sound much like the originals. In fact, sometimes they sounded pretty bad since the origiinal may have called for voices that just do not exist on a Yamaha.

To become acceptable, these "converted" styles must be tuned to a Yamaha keyboard. This tuning can involve modifying the actual voices used and resetting the volume of each voice in the accompainment and the OTS as well as the default tempo of the style itself. The end result may not sound a lot like the original, but it can be a very acceptable style in its own right.

That's what you will find in the "Other Keyboards" pages of this section. I have "tuned" a number of the styles in this section, but other PSR enthusiasts, as you'll see below, have contributed hundreds of additional converted styles. You'll find styles from Technics keyboards (KN-5000 and KN-7000). The Roland styles are from the G-1000 and the VA7. Korg PA-80 conversions have been provided by Bluezplayer (AJ), BMK, Tom G, Roger Z, and Eileen Lowrey, and by ndl, who added OTS to conversions by OHenry. "ndl" also sent in her complete set of Roland VA7 conversions. A big thank you to Charley for the many conversions from the Ketron SD1. Finally, thanks to Mike for a large collection of mixed style conversions from several other keyboards.

When the PSR-2000 was first introduced, there weren't a lot of styles available, but, since the keyboard accepted additional styles from a floppy drive, a lot of effort went into creating more styles for the keyboard. Since then, Yamaha has introduced the Tyros models, the 3000, and the PSR-S9xx series. Each model had more styles than the previous. New owners today have, literally, thousands of styles available for their keyboards. With such a large style library, not as much time is now spent on doing style conversions. But conversions from other keyboards still happen and you are likely to find many of those conversions in the various style sets available in the "Collections" section.


This page updated on February 16, 2024 .