Yamaha manuals:
What is wrong with the people at the Yamaha manuals department? The average Yamaha manual reads like some kind of weird Japanglish performance art written by someone who has not only never seen the machine in question but has been locked in an institution for the criminally illiterate for some time and has missed the last 20 years of electronic music. Lock 100 monkeys in a room with a typewriter and eventually by sheer chance they’ll come up with the works of Shakespeare, but not before they’ve knocked out every Yamaha manual on their lunch break.
Not content with constantly changing and swapping terminology all the way through every manual (RM1X users know the horror!), Yamaha are also very keen on spending paragraphs telling you the amazing things you can do with your new bit of kit, and then not telling you how. Another favourite is to tell you that you can do something and then referring you to another section of the manual where it will tell you exactly the same thing in slightly different words and very likely refer you to another section which has nothing whatsoever to do with anything you were trying to find. In the A4000 sampler manual you can look up the index in the index for gods sake!
Everything made by Yamaha in the last 15 years
Lets face it, after the ‘Solid Bass’ preset on the DX100 it was all-downhill for Yamaha. Anyone would think that i had a vendetta against Yamaha but it’s perfectly justifiable when you consider that every synth or sampler they make has had any ounce of character and inspiration surgically removed. For those of you without ears, any sound that has ever been anywhere near a piece of Yamaha kit tends to have a weird kind of alien digital / surgical upper mid range that sounds somewhat like the feeling of somebody very gently sandpapering your eardrums with a very fine grade of emery paper. Strangely pleasant but bloody annoying. I should also mention Yamaha’s hilarious habit of releasing a piece of kit and then totally ignoring that it ever existed but Roland are the kings of this particular area so ill leave that rant until another time.
