Yamaha RY30

The RY30 is an elegant Drum Machine with advanced synth-like features that give it a really great sound. Its sounds come from a sample-based ROM synthesis engine belonging to Yamaha's SY/TG series of digital synthesizers. It's sounds are 16-bit, 48kHz PCM with digital multimode filters. It can store up to 100 user patterns and 20 songs, plus it comes with 100 preset patterns in various styles for instant drum accompaniment.

The RY30 has 90 waveforms, most of which are acoustic drum and percussion samples. There are an additional 6 analog waves including sine, triangle, and saw waves. Two oscillators can be layered per voice, and the voices can be pitched and played via MIDI. It has 16-note polyphony, but loses one voices to the metronome. There are eight touch sensitive pads dedicated to a certain type of drum sound. There are 96 drums sounds built-in (12 banks of eight). Additional sounds and patterns can be brought in via ROM cards for the RY30/RM50 as well as some SY/TG cards.

There are digital 12 and 24 db/oct hipass and lowpass filters which sound ok, and are great for contouring sounds. There are no effects except internal samples can be played in reverse. It also has four outputs that you can assign any drum sound to (kick, snare, hihat, etc). A nice little Modulation Wheel can adjust the pitch, decay time, pan, filter cutoff and the balance of the oscillators. As far as drum machines go, the RY30 is one of the nicest and biggest rivals of the venerable Roland R8.