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All portable keyboards boast a wide variety accompaniment styles. These are preset backing parts which allow you to
accompany yourself while playing any type of music. And you
don't have to be a professional musician. Just press a couple of
buttons and before you know it you're a one-person band.
Students -- it's way more fun to practice piano using a backing drum beat
than the boring "tic tic tic" of a metronome!
Strike Up the Band
 You can choose a style from categories such
as rock & roll, dance, rhythm & blues, country,
Latin, and Waltz. If you're playing a Latin song, for
instance, call up a Latin style, be it Samba, Bossa
Nova, Rhumba, Salsa, or Mambo. The keyboard adds a
backing drum beat while you play. If you want "the
band" to join in, press the accompaniment (ACMP) button.
Now the pre-programmed backing part consists of a drum beat, a
bass guitar part, and other instruments such as Spanish guitar and brass
which beef up the band. While the accompaniment follows
the chords your left hand is playing, your right hand is
free to jam over the top with the melody instrument you choose.
You can assign a tempo to your arrangement,
or you can tap the desired tempo using the TEMPO/TAP button
and the keyboard will start the accompaniment after the
3rd or 4th tap. This also works while the style is
playing and can be valuable if you need to find the
tempo to accompany others.
One
Touch Setting
Many keyboards have this handy feature. When you select
one of the styles, the One Touch Setting provides you
with a recommended voice with effects for that selected
style. For example, on a jazz style, it might be piano,
for a Latin style it might be acoustic guitar and for a
rock style it might be a guitar with overdrive effect.
Create Realistic Arrangements
Each style has its own introduction, a main section,
fill-ins and an ending. You can start the song yourself
or hit the INTRO button and the preset accompaniment
plays an introduction for you. It then plays the main
backup part -- this corresponds to the verse of your
song. Hit the FILL button to trigger interesting variations
of the beat. Pressing the ENDING button will take you home,
all in the correct music style.
 
Most portable keyboards equip each style with two or more
variations so
that you can switch between slightly
different arrangements. For example, a variation on the Bossa Nova style might add a conga to "the
band." Some keyboards have a dedicated VARIATION
button; on others (like the one shown above), one button selects between the main
section and its variations. As you go higher in price,
you get more intros, endings and variations.
Customizing Styles
If you're looking for a songwriting companion, you
may want a keyboard which lets you modify a preset style
that's close to what you want. Here's some examples of
what you can do. You can:
- mute individual backing instruments -- on many keyboards, there's no way to turn off the
drum, bass, or backing instruments separately; the
entire arrangement is either on or off. In
the Country Hoedown style, for instance, you may not want to use the
fiddle in your arrangement.
- mix and match -- some of Roland's Arranger portable
keyboards, for example, have
a unique "Style Morphing" feature which allows you to
mix and match drum, bass, and accompaniment parts from
any two styles.
Say you want to use the drum groove from Techno with
the bass and accompaniment from Salsa -- no problem!
- change the volume of a backing instrument
- store you custom settings in a registration memory
(more about this later) for future recall
Brand New Styles
Advanced keyboards let you create your own brand new
style from scratch. This is very difficult to do and is
a feature for the pro player or serious keyboard
dabbler. These keyboards have a dedicated memory in the
keyboard called "User Style" for storing your
important new styles.
To supplement the superb preset styles, most
manufacturers provide additional accompaniment styles
available to purchase on diskettes or download from the
Internet. Trade with your friends!
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