Repeat song (or A/B) without metronome beat bar inserted?

[Dr.Riton]

I'm trying to do something very simple: use the repeat key to loop either a full recorded song or just a few bars. Annoyingly however, the keyboard inserts a full bar of metronome bell beats at each repeat, even though the metronome bell is deactivated.
I looked into the operator and reference manuals, didn't help.
Googling for it ('psr loop repeat metronome') I saw several mention of this issue on other Yamaha kbds, no solution, and some desperate users...
Searching this forum was no more helpful, so I'd ask you experienced user if you have some way of doing quick loop programming.
I do realize this could be done with a multipad, probably, but that sounds quite cumbersome for such simple function.
If already discussed in psrtutorial please point to the proper thread as I could not find it.

[SeaGtGruff]

I wrote the following steps a while back for the PSR-E series. I don't know how much-- if at all-- they might apply to the PSR-S series, but I'm sure the details of "step 0" need to be adjusted to compensate for differences in the panel buttons and menu screens of the PSR-E and PSR-S models.

0. (Preliminary step.) Press the FUNCTION button, use the CATEGORY buttons to navigate to the "MtrVol" function, and set the Metronome Volume to 0. If you don't do this, you'll get a metronome tick when you press the "<< Rewind" button in step 3 below.

1. Sometime during the measure you want the loop to start with, press the "A-B Repeat" button. If you try to time it with the start of the measure but hit it too soon, you'll actually select the previous measure, so it's better to hit the button a little too late rather than too soon-- e.g., hit the button on the second beat of the measure.

2. Sometime during the measure you want the loop to end with, press the "A-B Repeat" button a second time. This time, instead of trying to wait until the end of the measure, just go ahead and press the "A-B Repeat" button a little early-- e.g., on the last beat of the measure, or maybe even in the middle of the measure. Note that some songs don't use 4/4 time, so you'll need to pay attention to whatever time signature the song uses-- e.g., if it uses 2/4 time then you'll want to hit the button on the second beat.

3. After you've pressed "A-B Repeat" to mark the last measure of the loop, try to press the "<< Rewind" button just as the last measure is ending. As long as you didn't wait too late, the selected loop will immediately start to replay from its first measure, so if you pressed the button a little prematurely you might lose part of a beat. But if you wait a little too late you'll get the beat of silence while the keyboard pauses before it tries to play the two measures of metronome ticks. It's probably better to lose part of a beat than to get a full beat of silence, but with practice you should be able to hit the "<< Rewind" button at just the right moment so the loop is repeated "on beat."

4. When you want to stop looping and continue with the rest of the song, press the "A-B Repeat" button a third time sometime during the last playback-- i.e., don't try to wait for the end of the loop, just go ahead and press the button as soon as the loop has started to repeat for the last time. The song will proceed normally from there.

[Dr.Riton]

Thanks SeaGtGruff,

I had found your tip posted on another forum, and just retried it following very closely your instructions. Here is what I found on the 770:
0. Function/Utilities/Metronome : Bell off, volume 0 finally does remove the bell sound,
however the full bar is till inserted when looping back and now is a full pause.
1., 2., no problem, except on 770 it does start from and end on the beat you mark as A/B (can't say if it's more accurate than 1 beat as I have a condition we could label musical arrythmia  )
3., 4., The '<< rewind' trick I had missed at first. However on the 770 it does not do what you describe unfortunately: it just takes the song back 1 bar back each time I press, and while doing so pauses somewhat before it starts playing again (i suspect it stays on beat, but that's not helpful). It looks like the S770 behaves a bit differently from the E there...
So we're left with either an A/B repeat that does insert a full bar, which we can make silent but not remove...
Or create a multipad. I managed to do a loop with a multipad, however it's not nearly as practical as the repeat would be if it behaved properly, not forcing a useless bar on us.

[SeaGtGruff]

The steps I posted are only a possible workaround which may or may not work on some models, and definitely are not an ideal solution since they require constant monitoring and a manual retriggering of the loop at just the right moment. What people really want is some way to define a loop that will play forever by itself but be started and stopped at will. In short, they want something that's part song file and part style file.

In fact, you should be able to create a style file that works that way. As I understand it, the Intro, Main, and Ending sections of a style can be up to 255 bars each, whereas the Fill In sections can be only 1 bar (or half bar) each. So in the simplest case of a song with only one section that you want to loop while improvising or playing a solo, you could use an Intro for the first part of the song, a Main for the loop, and an Ending for the last part. If you need more than 255 bars for either the first or last parts, you might be able to tinker with the time signature and tempo such that one bar in the style file actually contains two or more bars of music.

Of course, one major difference between a song file and a style file is that songs can use 16 channels whereas styles can use only 8 channels.