NAMM: Yamaha's New Production Studio

US We liked this one 20/01/01

It's still having the finishing touches put to it but from what we see this could be a worthy rival to the MPC. It fills the gaps that the RM1X and SU series didn't span. It has 4mb standard ram, (expandable to 64mb) scsi as standard, 2x midi outs and a 16 part sequencer running midi or sample tracks. There's a brilliant feature called Integrated Sampling Sequencing that automatically breaks samples into discrete parts, (rather like Recycle) you can then affect the envelopes/tempo/filter/quantize etc. We heard this in action and were rightly impressed.

The on board synthesis engine has been totally redesigned and has a unique sound chip based on AWM technology with 632 waveforms and 1000 on board ROM based synth soundsand 63 drum sounds, There are filters with everythng each with 6 modes (including phat resonant low pass, band pass and high pass - all controllable with a multi stage envelope. There are also advanced LFO possibilities with many BPM syncable waveforms. Very much geared to performance and tweaking, all edits are saved as an integral part of the song and pattern data. This, together with 3 system fx plus the master FX section for mix inserts give you a pretty fine music production workstation that appears to be aimed squarely at the dance area and more impertantly, at the traditional MPC market. There is more - the sequencer allows you to create 10 sections per song and chain them together in various combinations 'live'. Providing a way to re-arrange the song on the fly. There are comrpehensive track soloing and muting functions to give you the build/ breakdown functions you need. Here are some specs:

200,000 notes

62 note poly

Resampling

1054 patches

SCSI and Smart Media as standard

Up to 256 samples

11025,22050,44100(mono,stereo)

Reads AKAI, WAV, AiF, A3000/4000 formats from HD, MO, ZIP, CD Thats all for now - we will be working hard to get a review copy ASAP.

Yamaha Social