http://www.ccmag.com/2009_07/ccmag2009_07twilhite.pdf
TYROS3 Provides the Keys
Terry Wilhite
Do you play keyboards in a church worship service? If you do or you’re a worship leader who has to listen to keyboard players talk about our instruments, you know our needs and our usual complaints. Let me rattle off a few and see how many ring true for you. First, we need better, more realistic sounds. Most keyboards have way too many weird sounds. (“Alien Infusion” is not a sound setting
that makes for a good offertory.) We demand a pallet of “real” instruments to choose from and they need to sound like the real thing. While I’m asking for a lot here, a keyboard should make us sound better than we are. For example, while ...\
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This is a zip file with worship styles made for the Yamaha Tyros series. Hope you can use it.
http://www.pulpithelps.com/www/docs/1090-6963
During a session a few years back in Atlanta, I met some music specialists at Yamaha Corporation of America who shared with me some new technology that totally changed the way I approach church music. Musicians with experience can benefit from it as well as pastors or lay leaders who don’t know a “C” from an “E.” The best-kept secret in church music is an automatic accompaniment keyboard. I had previously written such keyboards off because I equated them with the toy versions at Wal-Mart. What a mistake! Comparing a toy auto-accompaniment keyboard with a professional model is like trying to compare a Hotwheel® with a real Daytona Stock Car.
Here’s what an automatic keyboard can do for a pastor without an instrumentalist:
By procuring an SMF (standard MIDI file) of your favorite hymn or praise and worship song, you can pop the SMF diskette into an auto-accompaniment keyboard, press the “start” button and hear full orchestration. Standard Midi Files (the digital equivalent of player piano scrolls) for every major hymnal and praise and worship book can be purchased from places like www.musicmansion.com.
With an auto-accompaniment keyboard, you can even add “personality” to the most straightforward, basic, SMF file by playing the file using your choice of dozens of styles (pop, country, bluegrass, jazz, swing and more) that are available. It is also easy to set song marker parts for, say, the chorus of a praise and worship song—so repeats, “on the fly,” at certain points in the song are the press of a button away.
If someone has enough music savvy to read the chord progressions (C, D7, G, etc.) on sheet music and knows the equivalent on the instrument, one can take this technology even further by playing the note on the left-hand end of the keyboard, which will follow you with professional orchestration in the musical style and tempo of your choice.
While three or four manufacturers offer instruments in this class, I use the Yamaha PSR-1000 and Tyros for the preludes at our church, which are typically upbeat, praise and worship style music. With most of Yamaha’s higher-end auto-accompaniment keyboards, any part—drums, bass guitar, whatever—can be instantly muted so live musicians who are available can play the part. While beginners can use these keyboards, it is easy to dive into “deep water” and use all ten fingers and “zillions” of professional-level features, such as the on-board digital recorder on the ones I own.
In conclusion, the ultimate solution to ensure that there are instrumentalists in your church in the future is to “grow” your own! What a great addition these instruments would be for the young one’s Sunday school class. Even the larger auto-accompaniment keyboards are lightweight, making them easy to take them to the nursing home or mission field. Entry into the world of auto-accompaniment keyboards can be as low as $200. But remember, it’s usually the pastor that encourages the adoption of new technology. I hope you will investigate auto-accompaniment keyboards.
Terry Wilhite is a music and multimedia specialist. His email address is writeme@terrywilhite.com.
http://www.1manband.nl/omb.htm
One Man Band Originals for Windows version 10.3 what's new Transforms all (piano, synthesizer) keyboards into arranger keyboards with real time chords recognition!
Creates complete MIDI music-arrangements with just simple drag and drop operations!
Utilises, modifies and creates styles in Yamaha format!
One Man Band is a combination of a virtual music-keyboard with automatic-accompaniment, a sequencer that utilises styles and a style editor. It utilises standard style files that are compatible with the styles that are used in Yamaha PSR, DGX and Tyros arranger keyboards. It is able to play the thousands of Yamaha styles that are available on internet and it can create styles that can be played on a Yamaha keyboard. The sound quality produced with One Man Band depends largely on the quality of the synthesizers that are used. Make a quick start and try it out!Professional live musicians use OMB to build a high quality arranger setup with features that are not available in the best arranger keyboards. Connect a master keyboard with 88 keys. Plug-in DXi and VSTi softsynths with incredible real sounding instruments. You will have the presets of up to 3600 songs at your fingertips including text with chords and lyrics or even a scrolling display of the score. When a new style is being loaded the current style will continue playing until the loading is complete and then plays the new style without an interruption. The presets may include a wave/mp3 intro or play a multimedia file as accompaniment instead of a style. Karaoke files will be displayed with text in large font. An editor to create Karaoke files is included. A large number of chord recognition methods is available, also for MIDI guitars, MIDI accordions and MIDI Pedals. In full keyboard mode you can play on the entire keyboard and use a footswitch for chordfixation to indicate when chords should be recognised from the keyboard for the automatic-accompaniment and when not.Studio musicians are using OMB as a pre-production softwaretool. In the arranger and song window they can quickly try ideas with a lot of different styles, variations and chord sequences. OMB is both DXi and VSTi host and supports ASIO drivers. A complete sequencer for editing MIDI files is included too. All detailed event editing is done in easy eventslists and pianorolls. The result can be saved in a MIDI-file for further operations elsewhere. Listen to compositions made with OMB by Rob Meulman and by Sucrepop.Home musicians are using OMB for improving the sound of their arranger keyboards or to provide their digital piano or synthesizer with real-time auto-accompaniment. Load styles directly from the hard drive of your PC. Use the style maker for "tweaking" of styles and for making them sound better. Make a style from a MIDI file. Make a collection of style-tracks and use them in your uniquely mixed styles. Watch this YouTube demonstration of a Laos style made by a One Man Band customer.Beginning musicians will use the "PC Keyboard 1" user-interface in OMB for playing melody and chords without a MIDI keyboard controller. Play duets, one plays the auto-accompaniment chords and variation changes with the mouse and the other one plays the melody on the PC keyboard. Watch this virtuoso on YouTube.Download a demo version of One Man Band for free,or buy the full version for only USD 49.95. An upgrade costs USD 20.00. One Man Band requires Windows 98/2000/ME/NT/XP/Vista/Windows7.
