Abstract

The accompaniment apparatus for an electronic musical instrument comprises an accompaniment segment memory storing data representing a plurality of accompaniment segments which form a plurality of mutually different accompaniment patterns of predetermined lengths, and an alignment sequence memory storing, separately from the above, the orders with which these accompaniment segments are to be aligned sequentially. The data of these orders of alignment of segments are read out one after another, on the basis of which the accompaniment segments derived from the data of the segment memory are aligned one after another sequentially at a given tempo. This operation materializes the automatic accompaniment of any substantial length such as one whole piece of music, and allows the segment memory to have a capacity much smaller as compared to the case in which accompaniment patterns for the whole length of music have to be stored without skipping these segments of the same pattern.