Is it a good drum module? Are the sounds good quality?

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Duncan J. White

It was good for it's day - it's basically a drum-optimised TG500 module, with dual full synthesiser sections for each voice - it even has regular synth waveforms in there so you can melodic stuff as well.

The inbuilt sounds are typically 90's Yamaha - short, dry, with that Yamaha quality. Good quality for a drum machine, but don't expect to make "realistic" drum tracks.

So, it's very flexible, has 512K optional sample ram (sample dump via MIDI SDS = sloooooow) and can be had for peanuts. It's very mangle-able with it's filters and envelopes etc, and has a ton of drum sounds on board. It's quite tricky to use though - lots of functions and complexity with a tiny interface, although you can edit from a computer as well with appropriate software.

I already have my dance drums covered with my Novation Drumstation so I'm thinking it would be OK for normal, everyday drums?

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Duncan J. White

It was based on the classic RY30 or vice versa if I recall. The RY30 goes for crazy high prices on Ebay and I nearly bought one last year, but ended up with an AKAI MPD16 and a Yamaha QY100 instead.


NCGM

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Footloose and fancy free...gizz a job!

Quote DJW:

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I already have my dance drums covered with my Novation Drumstation so I'm thinking it would be OK for normal, everyday drums?

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Yes, if you like drum machine style drums.

No, if you want realistic kit simluations with sophisticated programming, 24-bit mlutisampled multi-miced drum kits.

Thanks a lot for all the answers, much appreciated.

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Duncan J. White

The Yamaha RM50 came this morning. I've been exploring the 64 preset kits. Great!

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Duncan J. White


Edited by DJW (03/09/07 03:39 PM)

Get into the voice editing with it - it has a suprisingly versatile drum-optimised synth engine - interesting filters and so on. You can do some cool mangling with it...

I notice it's got trigger inputs... Can these be used to trigger from audio transients (like the Alesis DM5 can) or is it only digital triggers from pads?

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http://www.myspace.com/fourtrackfrontier

From the manual about triggering on the RM50:

"You will also want to use the slow scan speed when the RM50 is receiving trigger input from audio equipment, such as a multitrack recorder, rather than drum pads."

Hi

I've got my RM50, great. Plays through the stereo out fine. Can I have six separate drum kits on six different channels going to each out? If so, how?

I've gone into Voice Assign where can select the individual out, but when I try to edit it, the Yamaha says "Cannot Edit This Data".

Your help is greatly appreciated

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Duncan J. White

Quote DJW:

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Can I have six separate drum kits on six different channels going to each out? If so, how?

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Yes, you can kits, single voices or voices in pitched voice mode on each of the 16 MIDI channels.

Quote DJW:

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I've gone into Voice Assign where can select the individual out, but when I try to edit it, the Yamaha says "Cannot Edit This Data".

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If you want to edit the preset kits, you need to copy them to the user area first, then make your edits.

OK, I've read the manual and managed to assigned a "Pitched Voice" to Channel 1 and a different one to channel 2. (I'm using P-MX bank for now).

From here I can press the following buttons, "Play, "Macro" and "Page". This gets me into "V.Edit" mode and here I can change assign the outs.

Is there another way I can do this with the complete kits?

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Duncan J. White

I am now the proud owner of a RM50 to go with my RY30. However I cannot get the RY30 expansion waveform cards to work with the RM50; the RM50 just says there is no card in the slot or words to that effect, and yet the cards all work fine in the RY30. I even tried one of my SY55/TG55 waveform cards and that did the same. I have read the manual, Googled for info and had a good look around the settings etc but not luck. So is there anything else I should be aware of? Or maybe the RM50 slots are not working?


NCGM

This is going back a way, but iirc there are various types of cards, including data cards containing RY30 rhythm and kit data, PCM waveforms etc. the RM50 can't do anything with RY30 pattern data. From memory, there is one data card slot, and three PCM waveform card slots.

So, which cards do you have, and which are you trying to get to work? I have a few RM50 waveform cards, and they work just fine - can't remember offhand whether they contained kit data as well, I think they did. I'm assuming you are putting the correct card type in the correct slot type.

So - are you trying to accessing kit data, pattern data, or trying to assign PCM samples from the cards into kits?

Edited by desmond (13/05/11 12:53 PM)

I have the RSC range of cards such as the RSC3072 Tommy Aldridge for example.

The cards I have:

RSC3001 Percussion
RSC3002 FX Drums
RSC3003 House & Rap
RSC3071 Dave Weckl
RSC3072 Tommy Aldridge
RSC3073 Matt Sorum
RSC3074 Peter Erskine


So far I have only plugged them in, powered on and then used the cursor button to move the < around the display. I then use the -1 +1 buttons to change from P, I to C but then I get an error saying no card.

So is the 'C' option only for selecting the data card? As I understand it, the RSC cards have wave, rhythm and song data .

Yesterday I installed the 512KB WAVE RAM upgrade and that seems ok, although I have not put any samples on it yet.


NCGM

Quote Neo-Classical Guitar Man:

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I have the RSC range of cards such as the RSC3072 Tommy Aldridge for example.

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Ok cool. That's a nice haul, as they are quite difficult to find - I have the Tommy Aldridge and Matt Sorum ones iirc. they work fine, and they should go in the PCM slot.

Quote Neo-Classical Guitar Man:

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So far I have only plugged them in, powered on and then used the cursor button to move the < around the display. I then use the -1 +1 buttons to change from P, I to C but then I get an error saying no card.

So is the 'C' option only for selecting the data card? As I understand it, the RSC cards have wave, rhythm and song data .

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I haven't used my RM50 for years, it's boxed up so I can't quite remember. I think that those cards only have PCM data (wave) - the rhythm and song data is not usable (although there might be demo song data, I can't remember)

So, I'm thinking that there might not be RM50 "kits" as such - you might need to program up your own kits using the PCM samples. Try copying a preset kit into the user area, then editing some voices to use the card samples. Does that work?

Quote Neo-Classical Guitar Man:

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Yesterday I installed the 512KB WAVE RAM upgrade and that seems ok, although I have not put any samples on it yet.

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Yeah, I have that too - I used to dump samples into it with SampleC on the Atari back in the day. Ahh... that was tedious...

Thanks for the help, I will try this and report back.


NCGM

Just to let you know that I have written a voice/patch editor for the Yamaha RM50. It's still very basic but it already allows to fully edit every parameter of a RM50 voice. The program is multi-platform, I have tested it on Linux and Windows XP but it should also run on OS X.

For more details see the following thread on the Yamaha forums:
http://www.yamahaforums.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=...

Thanks for the great start to a very promising application! I will be following this and helping where I can on and off, although I cannot promise too much in case I lack time etc.

Quote Neo-Classical Guitar Man:

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I will be following this and helping where I can on and off, although I cannot promise too much in case I lack time etc.

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Are you referring to the scans we talked about or are you saying you might also be able to help with the coding?

BTW, what OS do you use (Windows / OS X / Linux)?

Maybe it's best if we continue this talk on the related Yamaha forum thread as it's specific to the Editor software.

Sorry did not mean to confuse you, I am not a coder and regards the scans I will be doing that this week at some point. What I meant was that apart from scans, I will chip in with other things if I think I can, but no idea what that would be just now.

Quote Neo-Classical Guitar Man:

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Sorry did not mean to confuse you, I am not a coder and regards the scans I will be doing that this week at some point.

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No problem, the scans will be great help already!


Other than that, bug reports from anyone who tries out the software are always welcome, preferably on the related Yamaha forum thread, as I hang out mostly on that forum.

Seems like the RM50 is still popular then. I sold mine back in 2009. I liked the kits on it, especially the Rock Kit.

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Duncan J. White