At this point, if Yamaha or Korg collaborated with a computer manufacturer, and just put a proper DAW onboard a keyboard, with all the physical controls, and digital instruments needed, I would buy that in a jiffy.

I wish the manufactures would listen to you. One of them should hire you to help them design one.

Interesting topic. I agree, creating your own styles (I have a Genos 2) is a complex process. Moreover, the result is often not what you expect. As a music creator, I design my own music with my DAW.

Choose a style you like and use only the drums and bass. You have to record the other tracks yourself.
Then you can hear if you want to change anything about the drums and/or the bass and voila, you have something completely different.

I use my PSR-SX900 for songwriting, and for me the best tool in the toolbox for this. If I don't use intro number 3, all the styles will follow basically whatever I do.  Using the drum section in real-time and recording a sequence with it is light years better/easier than using  my Native Instrument's software drums with my new Kontrol S61. This NI system, for me, complements the PSR-SX900, adding additional sounds in Cubase. In my opinion, the arranger drum setup on the Yamaha PSR-SX900 is really innovative... to control a drum arrangement while playing. My two cents.

I only watched for the first couple of minutes of this video before my comment, I'll go back and watch it again to finish it up after I'm done commenting.  As an arranger keyboard fan, I totally agree.  As a fan of the Great American Songbook, most stuff from the 80s forward, for me, is not something I'm going to play.  I play for me, not others.

Having said that, several years ago, when I got my first Arranger Keyboard, a Korg iX-300, I went to play a piece of music for my Mom and step Father.  Since he is a country music fan, I pulled up a Country style.  I forget the song, some 'generic' country song, but the style wasn't the same as the song.  The melody was easy to discern, but his comment to me was that 'it wasn't the song he knew' because the backing tracks were wrong.  I've heard that from other family and friends when I've been playing.  People who aren't musicians often, not always, but often enough, when you go to play a song for them, expect to hear what they've heard on the radio or CDs.  They have come to expect to hear what they hear from the original songs.

Now, I tend to play Standards, and the nice thing about Standards is there are so many different people who have done covers of them that you can play with a different style, or even a completely different genre, and people will still recognize the song.  But, if you're playing anything from the 80s forward, people expect to hear from the keyboard what they hear from radio or CD, and if it isn't that, then it's not 'right', it's not 'the song.'

So, having said that, and with the primary audience of these keyboards being to people who may be playing out (I mean, how many home musicians want to spend $5-6,000 for a single keyboard when you can spend half of that for 80-90% of the capability), you have to provide what the customer base wants.  The base wants to pull up a style that sounds 90% like the original, especially if you're performing pop music from the last 40-45 years.

What I would like to see from both Korg and Yamaha are additional more 'generic' styles for rock and pop that work with more songs, and even the ability to take parts from styles and combine them together to make a new style  Building block styles.  I know you can add up to 1TB of storage space to the PA5X, but I'm not sure what you can store there.  If you could allocate some amount of that storage space to additional styles, and especially User Styles, then Korg, and other developers would create a whole slew of generic styles that would be accessible.  The same applies to Yamaha, Roland and Ketron.

I don't begrudge either Yamaha or Korg for creating song-specific styles, they are bread and butter for gigging musicians, but give us some options for generic styles, or build you own styles.

Touching on your comments about style creation, I agree . . . to an extent.  When I was young, I took about 12-18 months worth of piano lessons, but I had some developmental issues which were undetected and unresolved, and I never studied or applied myself.  I can't even read bass clef.  So, I did figure out chords, and for that reason, Arranger Keyboards for me are great.  But, to create a style really requires that you have some composition skills, and a lot of music theory.  Maybe in Europe and the Orient the music education in schools will cover that on a more basic level, but here in North America, not so much.  In the U.S. our music education in public schools has been decimated.  It takes years of lessons to get to the point where you can create your own style, and so many people don't follow through on that education.  Did you ever see Scott Houston?  He has the "Piano in a Flash" method of teaching people how to play, and all they're learning is chords and melody line.  He's not teaching them how to do the things necessary to build a style.
You know, if Yamaha or Korg wanted to introduce an educational series on 'How to Create A Style' and teach the basics of music theory and style creation for those of us who aren't 'real musicians', I think that would be awesome, and I would love to see it and learn it, but I doubt it would happen.  Could YOU do it?  Teach someone like me?
Now, one other option, and I've mentioned this before, but not in this role, is PG Music's Band In A Box, which has hundreds of MIDI styles which ideally could be used as the basis of creating Arranger tracks.  Now, Band In A Box's track generation is actually very sophisticated, allowing the program to 'look ahead' to the next chord change and then decide which pattern to use for each part.  For example, you may have a style and the bass track for that style may have totally different tracks for a one bar, two bar, four bar or eight bar patterns.  Since BIAB is not a 'real time arranger' it knows the chord progression for the song, and can select the pattern that is appropriate.  But, you could go in and take the four bar pattern for bass and copy that over to use it to create a pattern for a style.  Yes, you probably would be best served using an DAW or Sequencer to do all of this, but in the end, you could have styles that are as generic or as specific as you want.  One of the other features of the Korg, something I touched on in a different video, is that with the Korg arrangers, you have six different chord pattern variations.  Majors, Minors, Sevenths, Sixths and Augmented and Diminished CAN, but not always will (depending on the style), have different patterns.  Yamaha does not offer that capability.
Have you watched any of Alois Muller's stuff here on YouTube?  He's German, and a real guru of Arranger Keyboards, and I've seen some of the style modifications he's done, and honestly, it doesn't look that hard, but he's also not creating complete styles from nothing, either.

So, in essence, I agree with you, but I can also see what both Korg and Yamaha, as well as Roland and Ketron, have followed this.

There are many companies that sell styles for those keyboards and I think the built in styles being so song specific is helping them sell their stuff…

Hey Woody, I completely agree with you. This has been a problem for me for a long while whenever I upgrade to the next keyboard, it seems the more styles included, the more useless they actually can be.

Here are some thoughts. I like your idea of improving the style creator. It would be great, say, if there was a style creator 'bot' included where you can pick a certain type of rhythm style, eg, 8Beat, and the bot would scan through that specific bank and randomly generate a combination to create a brand new style from it.

Now going back to the main problem, I kind of semi-resolve this by going through some of the legacy generic styles from the previous models (both the Pa5x and Genos2 should be able to play styles right back from the i30 in Korgs case, and the PSR7000 in Yamahas case),  and improve them by revoicing them with the newer sounds. There's 1000s of styles to be had here.

Also to note that Korg has a huge Bonusware catalogue that also contains 1000s of excellent high quality styles, as does Yamaha that have made all their expansion packs free. There's loads of generic styles there too.

But I agree, the factory styles should mainly contain generic styles, and perhaps just have 1 bank section for "famous songs" as an extra bank.

I solved this problem by avoiding entirely arranging accompaniment lines and playing only bass by myself in my left hand, engaging an additional guitar player who sang along with just rhythm patterns from the keyboard, adding my comping with my right hand, mainly using piano like sounds. In this way we were playing gigs for decades, taking advantages of really well made rhythm patterns of Yamaha DGX and Roland E-series, using fill-ins and intro/ending possibilities, thus avoiding suggestions by a manufacturing teams and somewhat boring arrangements. Bass line played liva and natural sound of guitar made our music vivid and interesting, and our approach to the repertoire flexible.

I have a Genos 2. I understand what your'e saying, believe me. But what I do is create my own songs with existing styles, and try to make them as interesting as possible.I also utilize outside instruments, like a drum machine.  I also reinterpret old cover songs that have been played to death over the years, and create my own unique version of whatever song. A lot of fun!

For 20 or 30 years we complained that we couldn't find styles identical to famous songs on the keyboard arranger ! Do you think it's too much now ? I think it's perfect to be like that, that's the purpose of an arranger keyboard! It is an entertainment tool, and it is normal to have these styles ! If you want to compose, use a workstation! I personally think there are two big advances in the arranger category! 1 the sound quality and 2 the quality styles and closer and closer to great hits !

Totally agree - pretty much sums up my issue with arranger keyboards as well - but I can't see them moving in the direction you suggest, unfortunately.

You nailed the core problem, thanks! I also own an older KORG arranger and I suffered from these song related styles. Let’s hope that in the near future AI-based software (onboard) will be able to make the style creation much more easy and comfortable.

Great content - as always, much appreciated.  Entirely agree with you - about time to get these beasts to another level.

There is light on the horizon though. I have a few things on the Pa5x though .The midi files can be easily handled - if you put markers on the file - they become loops on the arrangement part strips - not too much effort - and they can be saved with the midi onto the song/songbook. You can use these as instant style parts, should you like those, no style conversion needed - you could mute the parts you would like to play yourself - this is the easiest first step. Then Yamaha provides a midi to style software  - you can use to create styles from midi files - this avenue is also available to you to lay down your own style as a midi file  on your DAW (style files are midi files in any case, with special markers) - and you can mark it up with the free Yamaha midi2style software for Genos ad PSR - and set the key etc. If you use this method, you can do a style  swiftly, not much computing required, this is the video to watch: https://youtu.be/yYfPbMFM5wo?si=KLW3GmtNBPk1JUIo. This is for Yamaha mainly, but the styles can be taken to Korg too with a bit of work - thanks to Qui Robinez, he provides great resources on his channel https://youtu.be/CYeas-GcTpM?si=n6PAPnbBTufsjWAV.

As far as using external samples on your arranger - it is also possible - you can create a midi profile to route your selected channels to output, where you can put your Kontakt player/Mashine/Mainstream/DAW VST plugin, tweak it to your heart content (even using Korg's sliders as midi controller), get the audio routed back to your Korg - and you are ready to go - the  copyright issues  are averted and you can revoice even your existing styles using your NI  Kontakt instruments.  Yes, it  takes a bit of work, but the results are great and the possibilities are endless.  Just going back to the start - the game changer will be when they provide an easy to setup style creator on the arranger keyboard itself - hopefully with computer support.

Apologies for the long comment, thanks again for your content, well thought out, engaging and greatly presented!

My Yamaha QY100 did this back in the day using 'INTRO,' 'PART A,' 'AB FILL,' 'PART B,' 'BA FILL,' 'OUTRO.' and setting the key the tune was to be played in. With that,  upon playing, you could play the chord progression using the key chord function on the bottom notes and play the chords over it. Of course, you could set how the machine sequenced each part to form a song, or you could select them manually on the fly.

In a similar context to this theme, I think Yamaha's style creator is of great significance. I hope that Cubase's chord track and Arranger track will fully inherit this system in the future

Where are the times when you just had simple march, walz, polka, 8-beat, 16-beat, bossanova and tango rhythms? The main problem lies in the pre-programmed chord progressions. Without them you could play many more songs with the styles.

hello Woody, you are right in many ways. However, there is a quick solution. Buy external ready-made styles and packs! I did that and they are not song-related styles.😀

Interesting thoughts.   I have been playing arranger keyboards for 40 years and now have a Genos2.  I can address the point of view of a home player (sometimes playing out, in the past, with a small band) who wants to make style playing as creative as possible.  While it is true that it is currently not easy to edit or even use style-assembly on the Genos (or previous models), the creative use of registrations in which you substitute other voices for style voices and especially mute (and then bring in) differeny style tracks for different registrations, greatly expands the creativity involved in style playing.  I should also mention that using the multipads, sync-stop, and more unusually, creating registrations that use more than one style (e.g. a Freeplay at the beginning, a more laid back one in the middle, and a full rocker for the last few registrations) also allows almost infinite creativity.  All this, of  course in addition to mixing the 3 right hand voices and using the left voice appropriately (usually turned off by default in Yamaha's registrations).  Admitedly, this can only be done after you familiarize yourself with the styles and multipads on your instrument to know which ones are appropriate for the genres you play that you can you can edit and combine.  There is no "bot" to do this and such a "bot" will not replace musical taste.  Doing what I suggest allows the style player to use the arranger with creative style arrangement,  analogous to the way a synth player would revoice and register their instrument.  The Genos2 comes with about 1600 registration banks programmed by Yamaha (once you register your instrument).  I regard those as just a starting point that allows me to rearrange and re-register things to my taste and to obtain more diversity in playing.  Finally, Yamaha also makes available (once you register) on the order of 30 premium voice and style packs and some of those are very good and useful.

I guess the main purpose of arranger keyboards is for home players to play songs that they know, 70s to modern.  Not so much on creating their own styles and songs, which synthesizers will do the job. I would say arranger keyboards are much like Electone organs, easier to operate than synths. I feel most people who buy arranger keyboards would want something easy to make a song out of it, not so much of sound designing or creating music out from nothing.