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Styles are the life blood of an arranger keyboard owner. Your keyboard, of course, comes with a number of preset styles built into the firmware of the keyboard. The newer and more expensive keyboards have better and more numerous styles. But, no matter how many and how great the styles included with your keyboard, eventually, you get used to all the preset styles and begin to yearn for something new and something different.

Of course, one of the great advantages of the Yamaha PSR and Tyros keyboards is the ability of users to load external styles into their keyboard as quickly and easily as they load the preset styles. To facilitate the use of external styles, the keyboards include external storage device(s) --USB drives, hard drives, or, on earlier keyboards, floppy disk drives or Smart Cards. These storage areas are used to hold additional files for your keyboard, such as more style files!

Where Do New Styles Come From?

You Create Them! - As you become more comfortable with your keyboard, you will discover that you can modify any of the preset styles in many different ways. You can change the OTS voices used. You can even change the accompaniment voices. You can increase or decrease the default tempo and set your own, preferred, left-hand voice. Many users will 'tune-up' a style with changes like this to modify it to fit a particular song. The revised style can then be saved to one of the user storage areas as a 'new' style. So, users themselves can create new styles by modifying the preset styles.

Others Create Them! - Unfortunately, not everyone has the time, or the talent, to tinker with styles and make their own versions. Fortunately, many folks who can modify styles have also chosen to make their versions available to others by uploading them to various internet sites. There are many such sites on the internet where you can find style files for use with Yamaha keyboards and there are, literally, thousands of these styles available for download. Some of these styles are 'tuned' preset styles, some are simply copies of preset styles from earlier keyboards, some are styles taken from arranger keyboards of other manufacturers and reformatted and tuned to work on PSR and Tyros keyboards. Some are styles that have been converted from midi files and some are styles that some very talented users have created themselves entirely from scratch. And, of course, you can also find commercial sources that have created styles and will be happy to sell them to you.

PSR Tutorial Styles

This Styles section has thousands of styles that you can freely download. These styles are in compressed 'zipped' files to minimize storage space and minimize download times. After you download the 'zip' file, you need to 'unzip' it on your computer to get to the included style files. You can then transfer these files to your Yamaha keyboard. Even if you have a high-speed internet connection, it can take a long time to build up your own collection of styles; if you have a slow connection, it can take a very long time. And then, you have to unzip everything.

If you don't want to bother with all that, you can simply get one of the PSR Tutorial style collections. The first collection was put together in the fall of 2007 and included about 19,000 styles. A second was released early in 2009 with 16,000 additional styles and the original collection was also revised at that time. The third collection was released in August of 2010 with 15,700 styles. A fourth collection, released in 2011, focused on Yamaha internal styles and includes all the preset styles from Yamaha PSR and Tyros keyboards introduced in the previous decade.

These large style collections were delivered on CD-ROMs with all style sets 'unzipped' and ready to use. Users could copy the files from the CD-ROM to their computer and then to a floppy disk or a USB drive where they could be immediately loaded and played on their Yamaha keyboard.

Since the introduction of the PSR-3000, the Yamaha arrangers have included USB connections and USB drives have become very popular with all computer users. The capacity of these small drives has increased over the years while the prices have fallen. Taking advantage of this trend, in January of 2012, we introduced a new 'style library' that included all of the styles in the first four collections, combined and reorganized into one convenient package distributed on a 4 GB USB drive.

The introduction of the USB proved very popular and gradually more of the available resources were modified so that they could be distributed on USB drives.

In addition to USB drives becoming more popular and economical, newer computers also improved in capacity and performance and high-speed internet connections are now common. In addition, the PSR Tutorial moved to a dedicated server with additional online storage space. So, in 2012, we were able to provide a number of resource collections in a format that could be directly downloaded. In this format, the style collections were compacted into several large zip files that had to be downloaded and unzipped to recreate the original collection -- more effort on the part of the user, but the style collection arrived in minutes instead of days or weeks.

In 2013, I redefined the PSR Tutorial resources available to users to reflect that what is being provided is acollection of files that you can use with your Tyros or PSR (or CVP) keyboards. Almost all of the collections are available by directly downloading the resource. You then unzip the downloaded files and reconstruct the original file set and organization.

For users who are not comfortable with all that downloading and unzipping, we also offer the option of ordering a USB drive with your file collecton. All of the files in the collection(s) you order will be copied directly to the USB drive, uncompressed and ready to use, and the drive mailed to you. All you have to do is plug it into your computer or your Yamaha keyboard and everything is ready to go.

The available USB drive (16GB) is quite large and multiple file collections can be added to a single USB drive. In the descriptions of the resource collections that we now offer, I include an indication of the size in GB of each collection as well as a size of the available GB space on each of the USB drives. So, you can easily determine what size USB drive you may need if you are interested in several of the available collections.

I have eliminated any additional Shipping and Handling charges from the individual collection prices since there are no additional postage or media costs if you download the collection. These costs are involved in the mailing of USB drives so the cost of the drives reflects not only the actual drive cost, but also copying all the files to the drive, which can take several hours, and packaging and mailing the drive to you.

So, if you want to add more styles to your own style library, you have serveral options available:

• Download individual style sets from those offered on the web site (all free).
• Order one or more of the large style collections. After your order is received, you will be sent an email with instructions and links for downloading the style collection (generally within 24 hours).
• Order one or more of the style collections and order one of the USB drives. All the collections you order are copied to your USB drive and the drive mailed to you. You will still be sent the download instructions and you can download some of the sets if you want to get started right away, but you don't have to since everything will arrive on the USB drive.

This page updated on March 17, 2019.