[sdiy] Yamaha QY10: other gear like it?

[anthony]

I just got a Yamaha QY10 on eBay yesterday. I had hoped to get it for my 
initial bid of $3.00, but it was not to be. Still I think $46.00 was an OK 
price. After I read about this thing - right after I first bid - I knew I 
had to have it. I thought about what I would do with it when I got it: Write 
songs and then dump them into Cubase VST via MIDI or the PC running Arturia 
Moog Modular or even the one with the Yamaha sound card that I use JUST for 
its wavetable synth. I could take it out with me and put down rhythm tracks 
without annoying my daughter and girlfriend with my human-beatbox (how I 
work on rhythms when I am not at home - heck even when I am at home...). 
Someone tried to snipe me, but they did not reckon on my eBay prowess. I 
can't even remember why I bid on it in the first place, but I figured if it 
was good enough for Craig Anderton it was good enough for me.

Oh yeah! ANYWAY - the point of this message is I was wondering if anyone 
else knew of gear like this: small, cheap, very useful, perhaps often 
overlooked neat little pieces of gear. Analog, digital, MIDI or not. 
Although I imagine what I am mostly asking about is small MIDI gear. I think 
we're often blinded by big and powerful things that we ignore the small and 
elegant.

How this ties into SDIY: in all likelihood I would modify the gear in some 
way to suit my needs. As I have said before I have NEVER bought a piece of 
gear that I didn't subsequently modify to get closest to exactly what I want 
(to great results with my DOD R-870).

In my plans for my ADA STD-1 clone I have begun pondering maybe having MIDI 
selectable presets.