| The RX8 is a recent introduction to the RXn family of drum machines from
Yamaha.
It is a lower-priced relation to the RX7, with most of the features, most of
the sounds, some improved features and a lower price tag, in a smaller box.
It is capable of storing 20 songs, made up of 99 patterns (and accelerando,
ritardando, repeats and volume changes).
There are 48 voices, mostly drum kit, other percussion, with 2 basses, marimba,
and DX7-style orchestra. Each voice is tunable over a 2 8ve range. You can also
add various effects to a voice, either in general, or for a particular beat,
such as accent, various stereo pan effects etc. The voices are polyphonic.
There is realtime and step time write. Quantization is controllable to 1/32 for
common time, or 1/48 for triplets. A pattern can be up to 32/16 long. It could
be written in realtime, with quantization set at 1/16, and then other voices
added in step-time with triplet quantization.
It is fully midi-compatible. A 2-8ve range of your midi keyboard can be assigned
to play (and store) either 24 different voices, or one voice over two octaves.
Useful for writing in those bass and marimba parts! This mirrors the behavior
of the 12 keys on the RX8 box, which can be assigned to different instruments,
or set up to play one octave in a particular instrument.
Song editing (as opposed to pattern editing) is fairly flexible, as you can copy
songs, and/or parts of songs to other locations.
Synch is via midi, or internal.
You can store and retrieve material over midi, to cassette or to ram card.
Outputs are stereo, and individual A&B, designed to send some of the voices
to effects boxes. This means that you can assign a some voices across the
stereo image, and send others (or perhaps the same ones) to individual outputs
A and/or B. Also headphones.
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| The reason I didn't include price in the review is that Australian dollars
plus Australian taxes etc. make it difficult to compare. However, I can give
a relative price.
It cost me A$630. The list price on the Roland R5 (a better machine) is
about $1100, and you could probably get if for $900 here if you shop hard.
That makes it the cheapest of the four machines that are roughly in the
same league, Yamaha's RX7, RX8 and Roland's R5 and R8. It is also least
capable of the four boxes, but it had the features I wanted.
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