Yamaha SU200

Yamaha's new budget phrase sampler is designed to allow rapid creation of phrase‑ and loop‑based music. Derek Johnson & Debbie Poyser put it to the test.

Hands up who remembers Yamaha's little blue‑grey, videocassette‑sized sampling box, the SU10? Launched as part of their portable 'Walkstation' series in 1996 (and reviewed SOS March '96), this unassuming £299 device marked Yamaha's successful return to sampler manufacture after a long absence. Since the SU10's launch, Yamaha have made great strides in the sampling arena, gaining enough confidence to introduce their sophisticated A3000 studio sampler (reviewed SOS July '97) and SU700 groove‑sampler variant (reviewed April '99), following them up with the highly regarded A5000 (and A4000, both reviewed April 2000). The cheap and cheerful approach of the SU10, however, hasn't been forgotten. The beginner/portable sampler market is still there to be served — and lately it's been augmented by a DJ and aspiring DJ fraternity for whom a phrase‑based sampler is ideal. Enter the SU10 for the 21st century: the appropriately silver‑clad SU200.

The Basics

MIDI implementation on the SU200 is confined to an input only, but this does mean that its samples can be triggered from a MIDI keyboard or sequencer.

To deal with the basics first, Yamaha's new baby is a 6‑voice polyphonic phrase sampler with eight pads (not velocity sensitive) for triggering loops and one‑shot samples, plus an extra 'Audio In' pad for mixing external audio alongside samples — hit this pad to allow the audio to sound, then again to mute it. Up to 24 samples can be held in memory, divided into three banks of eight samples each. The SU200 offers only data‑compressed sampling, but is able to squeeze a maximum of 333 seconds of sample time from less than 1Mb of unexpandable onboard flash sample memory (samples don't disappear on power down). This fairly amazing figure, it should be noted, is available only at the lowest of four sample 'grades', namely High (44.1kHz); Standard (22.05kHz); Long (11.025kHz); and Extra Long (5.5125kHz). The High grade, at the other extreme, yields 42 seconds of mono sampling. Since the 200 can sample in stereo, these figures are halved for stereo samples.

The SU200 features some basic sample‑editing facilities, plus a clutch of 'effects' — though not effects as most studio musicians know them — and an enjoyable ribbon‑style Scratch controller which can be used alone or in conjunction with the effects. The new machine is extremely portable (but not as small and dinky as the SU10), can run on six AA batteries as well as mains power, and stores samples to optional SmartMedia cards.

On the MIDI front, 'basic' is the watchword: the 200 isn't multitimbral as such, operating on only one MIDI channel, though up to six different samples can sound at one time. It doesn't even have a MIDI Out, but its MIDI In at least means that it can be triggered from a MIDI sequencer if desired. While it has inherited a fair bit of OS from the SU10, the SU200 isn't simply a copy of the older machine in a larger, snazzier box. Indeed, it offers both more (including some bits inherited from the SU700/A3000) and less than the diminutive SU10, as we'll see.

Silver Surfer

Though rather light when lifted, the package Yamaha have chosen for the SU200 is immediately appealing. Its matte‑silver plastic finish is complemented by opaque, illuminating buttons, black legending, and three chunky control knobs, and its illuminating trigger pads are suitably large and finger‑friendly. The respectable selection of controls is clearly labelled, and while there's some doubling up of buttons for various functions, this is fortunately kept to a minimum.

The custom backlit display, similar to the SU10's, comes into play when samples are to be be recorded, as it hosts an input‑level meter, and also generally keeps you informed as to the status of samples (for example, their 'grade' and whether they're mono or stereo). In addition, it has a numerical section showing sample start and end times to help with trimming samples, and keeps tabs on remaining sample memory as you work. It lacks a contrast control, though, and can be tricky to see at some angles in some lighting conditions — could be awkward on stage.

At the rear are the L/R line inputs, mic input, and L/R stereo out, all on jacks, plus a mini‑jack headphone socket, MIDI In, SmartMedia card slot, and the socket for an external 11.5V PSU.

Step‑By‑Step

The best way of explaining how a machine like this works is to run through the process of recording a sample, editing it, and applying effects — all of which are actually quite straightforward, even for relative novices.

The audio source is connected to the relevant input, and input level adjusted using plus and minus buttons under the SU200's LCD. A sample grade is chosen, and a trigger mode set — sampling can be initiated manually, or automatically when a user‑settable trigger level is reached. Before sampling, it's necessary to choose a pad for the sample to go to, as well as whether it'll be mono or stereo and then you're off. Samples can't be named, by the way, so you might want to keep notes.

Once the desired audio is in place, it can be assigned a volume level (but not a pan position), copied to another pad if desired, and trimmed. You do this initially by using your ears: play back the sample, hitting the Start Point and End Point buttons on the fly where you want the sample to start and end. These points can then be fine‑tuned with the help of front‑panel controls and the display, which lets you edit in terms of individual samples and tempo. The latter option is ideal if you know a sample's tempo, since samples taken in auto trigger mode should have a clean start; trim the end until the correct tempo shows in the display, and you have a perfect loop. The Point Clear button erases any erroneous points, and unwanted data at either side of the edit points can also be erased, returning precious RAM to the global pool. Now simply carry on sampling.

One thing you'll notice during sampling is that the SU200 automatically detects a sample's tempo. It also auto‑detects sample length, but assumes that this will be either one bar or two bars, with a 4/4 time signature. However clever and useful these automatic tools are, locking samples into one‑ or two‑bar units can cause problems later — more in a moment.

Note that though there are various pad playback parameters that help you engineer samples to play well together, you can't alter the pitch of samples. Pitched sounds are going to have to be in the right key to start with. There is a separate play mode, called Scale, which spreads a single sample across all eight pads at a different pitch on each pad, making up a major scale, but it's a bit hard to see what this is for. You could play a tune with the sample, by hitting the relevant pads, but as Scale mode can't be combined with normal pad‑triggering mode, any tune couldn't form a part of a multi‑sample performance.

The four pad playback parameters mentioned above, all non‑destructive and easily switched on and off, are each accessed by dedicated buttons.

• The Gate/Trigger button governs whether the sample plays back only while its pad is held, or plays in its entirety even if the pad is hit and released.
• One‑shot/Loop determines whether a sample will play once or loop until the pad is pressed again to stop it — ideal for drum and rhythm loops, for example.
• Normal/Reverse allows you to set a sample to play in reverse for a special effect — you can even do this in the middle of loop playback, which is neat.
• Lastly, the Loop‑Track Play Mode button causes samples with different tempos, assigned to different pads, to play back all at one user‑settable tempo which can be input manually, tapped in, or determined by incoming MIDI clock. (The samples' original pitches are preserved during this process.) Tempo ranges between 60 and 240bpm, but be prepared for a world of strange artifacts when attempting to match samples with widely disparate tempos. Unfortunately, you should also be prepared for rhythmic clicks even when playing back a sample that's at the same tempo as the Loop‑Track Play tempo, because the SU200 processes even samples that already have the correct tempo!

Apart from the clicks, the results of the clever real‑time time‑expansion and compression that's evidently taking place during Loop‑Track Play are OK, even with quite extreme tempo changes. However, strange noises occur during simultaneous playback of samples recorded at different Grades, especially in Loop‑Track Play mode. Though the SU200's manual says samples recorded at different rates can be mixed, small print warns otherwise in some circumstances, with good reason.

One further fly in the ointment is that, as mentioned above, Yamaha seem to have assumed that all samples will be one or two bars long, and that's the basis on which the SU200 works out sample tempos for Loop‑Track Play mode. If a sample is longer, the SU200 calculates its tempo incorrectly and applies the wrong correction to get it to play in tempo with the other pads. The results can be interesting, but perhaps not always what you're looking for! In some cases, the SU recognises a 2‑bar loop as one bar anyway — this consistently happened during the review with 2‑bar samples of hi‑hat patterns, for example.

There are two further ways to implement time‑stretching; one is a real‑time effect called 'Time' — more shortly — and the other is a permanent process that matches the tempo of one sample to another. For example, if one sample runs at 100bpm and another at 120, you can stretch the 100bpm sample to 120, or compress the 120bpm one to 100. Quality is as variable as with other processes on the SU200; extreme stretches rhythmically chop the sound, and can spoil loop points.

Most Effective

As mentioned earlier, the SU's effects are not effects as in reverb, chorus, and so on (though there is a simple delay) but rather ways of putting your samples through the sonic mangle. This is one area in which the SU200 does rather better than the SU10. Yamaha seem to have borrowed a couple of interesting tricks from the SU700/A3000 samplers and built simplified versions of them into the 200, which can only be good news.

Effect control is well implemented, with each type having a dedicated button and two of the three chunky knobs controlling a couple of parameters per effect, in real time. However, the knobs aren't calibrated, so you often don't know how much of a given parameter you're applying. The Scratch pad can control one effect parameter too, as well as providing a scratching effect that apes the sound of manually moving a vinyl record back and forth past a needle. This is very easy to perform and can be convincing with the right material, but another compromise occurs if you use Scratch: maximum polyphony is cut to four voices.

The effects available are as follows:

• Filter: certainly a resonant filter process, but no more details are given in the manual. Resonance and cutoff frequency are altered by the two knobs.
• Delay: a time‑based delay which automatically varies with sample tempo. The two knobs control delay Level and Time parameters.
• Distortion/Low‑fi: adds the currently vogueish nasty quality to a sample, but with nothing to edit all you can do is govern Amount.
• Tech‑Mod: sounds something like an LFO with resonance. The knobs in this instance control Amount and Modulation speed.
• Slice: according to the manual, this process "cuts the sample into a rhythmical pattern of discrete, intermittent slices." This is one derived from the A‑series samplers and is very effective, sounding something like an LFO that's been applied to the amplitude or gate time of a sample. One knob chooses a slice 'pattern', and the other modifies gate time.
• Loop Remix: another bit of effective trickery from Yamaha's more expensive samplers, this process "breaks the sample into multiple pieces and rearranges these pieces into a different order" — they might even be reversed. The knobs in this case control how many chunks a sample is divided into (all done by ear), plus how much reverse playback of chunks is included. It's great on vocal samples.
• Time: this is lumped with effects in the manual, though it's activated by a button near the Tap Tempo switch, whereupon you use the tap tempo button or one of the knobs to change a sample's tempo in real time; the manual notes that this introduces a distortion effect, but whether that was deliberate on Yamaha's part or just a side‑effect of the process is anyone's guess — it sounds more like noise than meaningful distortion to these ears. Whatever the case, this effect can actually sound great on vocal samples.

Only one effect can be applied to one sample at a time (and this fairly stingy effects allocation is cut to no effects or Scratching, if a sample has been recorded at High grade). To mitigate the paucity of simultaneous effects, there's a Resample facility for re‑recording a sample with its effect, freeing up the effects to use again. However, on the down side, resampling is automatically done in mono and at Standard grade, so stereo samples become mono. Also, if the sample you want to process was recorded at a lower grade, to maximise RAM, it would actually use up more memory after resampling. It's thus impossible to use resampling with the SU200 in the way it was used before samplers had as much memory as they do now — to save RAM by re‑recording at a lower sample rate. Also, you can't resample a High‑grade sample at all, which is bizarre. Do so and the sample is shifted an octave lower.

It's worth noting that some effects — distortion/lo‑fi, delay and filter — can be applied to incoming audio while samples are playing. Obviously, when used in this way, the effects aren't available to samples.

Hands On

Once you've prepared your samples, you can create a performance, by simply hitting the pads you'd like to sound, remembering that exceeding the polyphony limit will lead to samples being cut off. Played in this way, samples can be freely mixed — a sample from bank A can be set to loop continuously while you switch to bank C to add a sample or two from that bank to the ongoing performance, for example. DJ types could, of course, mix external audio alongside such an SU200 performance, if desired, though they'd have to control the level of such audio at source. Sadly, the SU200 lacks a sequencer of any kind, which is odd when one considers that the SU10 managed a pad‑hit sequencer that made quick track creation quite an easy task. (Zoom's £250 SampleTrak ST224, reviewed SOS January '99, offers a sequencer, as does the £429 Korg Electribe S sampler, reviewed in August 2000. Both should also be considered if you're looking in this price range.)

The closest thing to a song‑creation aid occurs in Loop‑Track Play mode. While individual pads from different banks can't be mixed in this mode, it's possible to initiate a Loop‑Track Play performance in each bank, and switch between them. This allows the user to introduce variety into a performance, by setting up three different sections of a song or track and moving between them in real time. The transition between bank changes is smooth — all samples will be playing at the same tempo in Loop‑Track Play mode and the currently looping samples finish their last repetition before the samples due to play in the newly selected bank start. It's probably feasible to do if you're playing live, and a performance could be captured if you had an audio recorder hooked up to the SU200.

The other option is to use a MIDI keyboard or sequencer to trigger samples. In this case the SU's pads (three banks of eight pads each) are assigned to the 24 white notes on a MIDI keyboard, starting at C1. Samples respond to velocity when triggered over MIDI, and you can access all three banks' constituent samples without having to change banks. The exception occurs if you're using Loop‑Track Play mode; in this case, you can only trigger samples in the currently selected bank. And there's no way to select banks remotely, using, say, program changes.

Judgement Day

We've got to return a mixed verdict on the SU200. For even moderately serious samplists, the compromises that occur when balancing polyphony and effects usage against sample rate, scratching against polyphony, and so on, are aggravating (these people could do worse than aim for the excellent SU700 instead). The MIDI spec is very basic, and the sound leaves something to be desired if you're accustomed to even budget studio samplers. Perhaps Yamaha should not have offered the ability to use samples recorded at different rates in the same pad bank, since it has a detrimental effect on sound quality.

However, the SU200 does have its strengths, chief amongst these being its ease of use and the fact that you can have quite a lot of fun with it. As a budget introduction to loop‑based sampling for novices, it's not bad, and the effects (especially Loop Remix and Slice) provide a real taste of sophisticated sonic manipulation. It's a shame that effects usage is so limited and that there's no on‑board way of sequencing pad hits.

Beginners, those on a tight budget and DJs wanting to add a little extra to their rig could all find something of value in the SU200. The latter especially may well revel in its exultant low‑fi‑ness.