[sdiy] OT: What happened to Yamaha?...

[Oakley Sound]

 > This from the company that gave us the CS-80. Faceless workstations.

I understand where you're coming from. But, if you look at the old 
Yamahas they were preset machines, even the CS-80. Oboes, flutes, pianos 
and so on. Yes, they did have some degree of control but they were 
designed to copy other more traditional instruments because that's what 
the buyers wanted. Even the fully programmable synths came with patch 
books with much the same instrumentation. Occasionally, you'll get some 
'silly' sound but for the most part it was copycat emulations. And 
pretty bad ones at that.

Yep, you could do the wacky thing and create your own noises but I don't 
think that back then they were used that often to do that.

I was in a gigging band in the 80s. I had the most stupid amount of gear 
at the start. A string machine (RS-09), a monosynth (a modified Rogue) 
and two bloody polyphonics (an 8 voice home made thing that I built to 
look like the Voyetra-8) and a Korg Poly800. If someone offered to swap 
all that for a Yamaha Motif at the cost of only a months wages I'd would 
have jumped at the chance.

I did swap it out in the end. For one D-50, a D-110 and a TR-505 and a 
lot more than a months wages back then. Gigging life got that much easier.

The thing is that the us synth groupies may not like the way Yamaha has 
gone but the keyboard buying public are presumably happy enough with 
their output.

Tony

Oakley Sound Synthesisers                    http://www.oakleysound.com

My Music                                http://takla-makan.bandcamp.com