Yamaha

Paul White, with a little help from Rachel Fletcher and Paul Farrer, gives a blow-by-blow account of a controller that allows MIDI modules to harness the power of wind.

In 1995, Yamaha's Promix 01 smashed everyone's preconceptions of how much a digital mixer should cost. Now the new 01V is changing the rules again, offering features more akin to those of the three-grand 03D than the Promix 01 — and it cost £500 less than the Promix did when launched!

FM synthesis was the success story of the mid-'80s, and synth based on its principles, like Yamaha's DX7, sold by the bucketload — until affordable sample-based synths arrived at the end of the decade. Now, with their new FS1R, Yamaha have updated the technology for the late '90s.

Paul White finds a few ways around the restricted breath-control facilities of the Yamaha VL70m.

Yamaha's RS7000 is a groovebox with a difference. Incorporating a sequencer, sampler and a synth, it claims to offer everything you might need for modern music production.

For 10 years, Yamaha's compact QY 'walkstations' have offered an impressive set of tools for the mobile MIDI musician. Nicholas Rowland checks out the latest, which adds guitar and vocal processing.

In these days of virtual instruments and fully featured software sequencers, why should you even consider spending £2000 on a cumbersome hardware synth workstation? If the workstation is as well thought-out as Yamaha's new Motif, perhaps you should.

In the second instalment of this two-part retro, Gordon Reid recalls FM's finest hour, and describes the heyday of what was perhaps the most successful family of synthesizers ever developed.

Although FM synthesis has its roots in the sixties, the instruments that popularised it were to dominate the synth scene of the eighties. Gordon Reid uncovers the origins of FM and charts its rise to fame from its unlikely beginings in academic research in the USA.