The First Step is Important!

(English Translated by Roland Wehlend) First you need to give some thought to your choice of file and folder naming convention as well as folder hierarchy. Otherwise renaming or moving files later will be a pain.

Files are only visible if you are in the corresponding section. This means that a style file, for example, will be invisible unless you are looking in the STYLE section (navigating sections using the buttons A through J on the home screen). Folders, on the other hand, are always visible.

Folders can only have up to three levels under the user memory (USER tab). In other words, you can have a folder with sub-folders, each of which then has only one more sub-folder. This limitation does not exist when creating folder hierarchies on the hard drive (HD1 tab).

Create Folders

The first thing you want to do is create a number of folders on your hard drive. I suggest you create 11 folders: Audio Songs, Misc Text, Lyrics, Midi, Multipads, MusicFinder, PlayLists, Registrations, Styles, System, and Voices. I'll give a brief description of each below. The screen shot shown here illustrates the folder organization that I use on my own hard drive.

Audio Songs

Everything in terms of audio songs goes in here - be this your own keyboard HD recordings or imported audio files (.wav files). Sub-folders under Audio Songs may have names like "My Demo Songs", A - Z for music titles.

Tip: Create two sub-folders - one "Dinner" and the other "Dance Music". If the situation arises where you are a guest at an event and also an entertainer, you can use the song material in these two folders as background music while you are dancing or dining.

Another sub-folder under Audio Songs I like to create is "Customers". Sometimes an event coordinator will send me some songs in advance asking me to play them back during the event.

Lyrics

• By Artists (You would use the same sub-folder structure as under MIDI where lyrics are sorted by language and/or performer/band.)
• By Countries (Here you can store lyrics where you don't know the artist such as folk lyrics in a particular language for instance.)
• Under a folder "Germany" you could, for example, use Birthday, Funny, Opera, Folk Songs, Hit, Children, Farewell - and sort it that way.
• By Theme: (Christmas, Swing & Jazz, Classical, ...)

MIDI

One could sort your midi songs by:

• Quality (XT5, XT4, XT3, XT2, XT, XG, ...)
• Artists (To avoid filling up folders quickly - you can create sub-folders that pre-sort things like language and/or performer/artist/band for example.)
• Theme (Christmas, Farewell, Spring Songs, Children...)
• Producer
• Music genre (Rock, Jazz, Classical, Folk, ...)
• "My Own Recordings"

Registrations

Ideally - you would structure registrations in various different folders and use a sorting strategy that will take you to the next song with as few button hits as possible.

• Alphabetical
• By dance style (waltz, foxtrot, Discofox, etc.)
• By instrument (best instrumentation for piano, strings, brass, ...)
• By theme (musicals, jazz, Christmas, by artist, ...)
• By mood
• By event situation (introduction, dinner, dance, party, goodbye)
• By dance number
• Also - if you play with different bands or formations - name the main folder correspondingly.

Tip: Information like what key, time signature, etc. can be part of the registration name.

For a more detailed discussion of organizing your registrations, see the Registration Workshop in this section.

Misc. Text

Miscellaneous text files with the file extension .txt can be used for various purposes such as text notes, lists and others. So text files go into this folder.

Multipads

Most likely you will not have any sub-folders under Multipads as there tend to be quite a bit less multipads in comparison to the higher numbers of styles, MIDI or lyrics. I like to sort my Multipad banks by capital letter prefixes. For example, I use a "V" as an abbreviation for Vehicle so I can have things like "V Car" or "V Fire truck". The letter "P" can be used for People like "P Applause" and "P Baby". You could use "A" for animals, "H" for hobby, "W" for water, etc.

MusicFinder and Playlists

Since there are usually only a few entries under these folder, you will most likely not require any sub-folders.

System

Create three sub-folders for the most common system files: "User Effects", "System Setup" and "Background" (background images in bit map format)

Styles

If you had a previous Yamaha keyboard, you can name the folders after the keyboard model and then, under that, create the sub-folders using the original keyboard's folder names (pop/rock, ballad, latin, ballroom, country, entertainer, ...)

You might also create a main folder and then sub-folders either by style producer or by music genre.

Voices

Create two sub-folders "Custom Voices" and "Library". If you have a Tyros5, you could also create a folder for "Ensemble" voices.

(The original tutorial, Datei-Organisation im Keyboard , is available on Heidrun's Tyros3/4/5 website.)

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This page updated on April 10, 2019 .