Yamaha QY 100: any good?

[Chuck E. Jesus]

saw one of these today at a pawn shop for $140 bucks, i've always been interested in it...i read some reviews, but i was wondering if it can be used to sequence external gear on different midi channels...any general opinions and comments on it would be cool, i have an idea how it works with it's internal sounds from what i've read, that's about it...

they also had the Yamaha table top drum pad kit, the slightly larger one...seriously thinking about getting it for my kids ($109, good price i think)...

seeing how i just dropped about 400 bucks on school clothes, i'm not ready to run out and buy anything, but they do seem like good deals

[R'yleh]

I have the QY70 ( the smaller one )and i absolutely love it. It is a very good sequencer and the inbuild sounds are very 90ties , but useable for sketch and you can replace with other sounds later. The sequencer is even faster to work with than the ORION sequencer ( which says something )....

[jupiter8]

A friend of mine bought a Yamaha QYsomething early 90ies and thought he'd use it to write songs on the bus and whatnot. As far as i remember he did'nt do anything useful with it.

He did buy the Yamaha drum pad thingie as well. That was a lot of fun as it had midi but as noone of us was any good at drumming it did'nt get used much. But at least that one was fun to play with.

[Chuck E. Jesus]

A friend of mine bought a Yamaha QYsomething early 90ies and thought he'd use it to write songs on the bus and whatnot. As far as i remember he did'nt do anything useful with it.

He did buy the Yamaha drum pad thingie as well. That was a lot of fun as it had midi but as noone of us was any good at drumming it did'nt get used much. But at least that one was fun to play with.

also got the old 4 pad yammmy drums, but my kids don't mess with it so much (used to when they was very little but mostly with the patterns), i think if i hooked up a kick pedal and with the bigger pads it would be cool for them ...i think i'm gonna pick that up and forget about the QY dealie...i also thought about doing shit while waiting for whatever and whatnot, but i'd probably never use it either....

[inverseroom]

The QY's are super fun. I recorded most of an album with one, believe it or not. The sounds are very limited and pretty GM-ish but there is no better companion on a long bus ride.

[kritikon]

My first ever sequencer was a QY something-or-other. No inbuilt sounds though, so it must have been an earlier one.

All I can say is that a h/w sequencer like that will make you concentrate on the song and its structure more than the minutiae, which tend to distract you with a PC host on a big screen. You certainly can make whole songs on them - mine was 16 channel from what I remember, and had plenty of memory for at least one whole song. The down side is it's a right royal PITA to edit stuff one them - changing patterns around was incredibly tedious (simply repeating patterns is easy enough, but when you need to swap whole choruses about etc...nightmare time), and at the time it wasn't much use for me because I wasn't much of a player. If you can tinkle the ivories, then it might be a very good buy - if you're more into actual midi sequencing then I'd have to say avoid them like the plague.