Yamaha RY9 Big Jam 1999 - Gold

What you will find inside are 128 drum samples, 50 melodic voices, 200 preset and 50 user patterns, 200 auto‑accompaniment backings, 50 preset and 50 user songs, plus extensive programming and MIDI capabilities, all of which is shoehorned into a casing about the size of a VHS video cassette. The front panel sports a useful‑looking LCD, tape recorder‑style buttons for the recording and playback of patterns and songs, a set of function buttons and 12 drum pads which also double as function‑select buttons. While the drum pads are not velocity sensitive, the unit is velocity sensitive over MIDI. For the record, polyphony is a perfectly respectable 28 notes.

Designed primarily with an eye to busking guitarists in need of a portable backing band, the RY9 can run on six 1.5V AA‑sized batteries, though it will also take a 12V wall‑wart power supply. Connections comprise MIDI In and Out, right and left/mono outputs on quarter‑inch jacks, a headphone output on mini stereo plug, a master volume slider and a mono external input. This enables you to plug in a guitar so that if you've got limited mixing facilities, you can mix the signal in with the RY9's voices. The jack also allows you to use the RY9 as a guitar synthesizer.

The RY9's guitar input offers both a standard mix function and a guitar synthesizer function. The synth facility operates in four different modes. The first simply triggers whatever note you are playing on the guitar (incidentally, the RY9 can only recognise single notes — so you can forget trying to translate a bunch of power chords into a full orchestral onslaught...). Octave mode gives you the same pitch as the guitar and a note an octave lower. The three 'Harm' modes give you the original pitch plus a harmony note determined by the currently selected chord. In Chord mode, any note you play on the guitar will trigger a full chord of notes, again determined by the current selection as displayed in the upper left area of the LCD. Any notes triggered externally can be transmitted via MIDI, so you could potentially use the RY9 as a pitch‑to‑MIDI converter and play an external module.