This is usually not a big deal, but sometimes it is. They often have more than the 5 instruments that BiaB is limited to. There are of course other things the keyboard styles do IMO better. And where the keyboard style has 2 different rolls, mine usually have 8 or more. So where the original keyboard style had 8 patterns, my styles have hundreds. So I took the root ideas of those styles, recorded plenty of variations on those themes into my sequencer, and then imported the snippets into BiaB. The styles based on these keyboards are clearly marked as such, to differentiate them from majority of styles which I have made 'from scratch' using my experience as a multi-instrumentalist (sax, flute, wind synth, keyboard synth, guitar, bass, & drums). Direct copies would be impossible for the reasons mentioned above. They of course are not exact copies, but simply inspired by these keyboards. I've also gone the other way around, and based BiaB patterns from ideas I have gotten from the Korg i3, Korg PA80, ad Technics KN7000. Which 8 would you choose to put into your Yamaha? And ZZJazz has only 3 instruments, drums, bass and piano. So for example, the 'stock' ZZJazz style has over 300 patterns. There are masks for the number of bars after the last part marker, the beat of the measure the pattern starts on, the Roman Numeral of the chord, the chord type (7th, minor, half diminished, etc.) and so on. Then you can program a few others for the same situation and give probability numbers to them so the one with the most personality appears the least and the more generic ones appear more often.Īnd this is only one situation example.

You can program one pattern to appear only on a V7 chord before a drum roll and only in the next chord is a I chord. The 'genius' in the BiaB styles is that there are several masks in the StyleMaker that take advantage of that. Plus, since you enter your chord progression first, BiaB knows what chord you are playing, how it relates to the entire chord progression, and what chords are before and after.

That's a lot more variety than 8 measures ad infinitum. The auto accompaniment keyboards generally play from 2 to 8 measures of music (depending on the keyboard), over and over and over and over again, without any regard to what chord you are playing, how that chord fits in the progression, what chord came before, and what chord is coming next.īiaB on the other hand can have hundreds of patterns ranging from 2 measures to 2 beats. Here is the difference, and why it can't be done well.

I've written styles for BiaB, Jammer, Korg i series, Yamaha PS series, and others. Perhaps I shouldn't have said 'Can't be done' but I should have said 'Can't be done well.'

Yamaha style player