This is kind of an oddball question, but I figured this would be the place to ask. I was messing with a yamaha keyboard(psr-12) that I've had lying around for a couple of years, and was suprised to find it had a setting that sounded remarkably like the kind of sounds produced by the megadrives yamaha chip. Looking at the keyboard I had assumed it was from the early 90's, but the manual I found online has a copyright of 12/14/98. Do most yamaha keyboards from the 90's sound like this? Or did they continue making low end keyboards with chips similar to the yamaha ym2612?
The sound chips thrown into many of these 'cheap' Yamaha keyboards remained pretty much the same. New styling, a few new samples and Yamaha would release it as a 'new product', but under the hood they were technically the same. They also had a 'set' list of basic sounds based on the assumption that it was 'GM' (General Midi) therefore if you used a previous Yamaha product with a sequencer (Steinberg Cubase for example) that you could produce a piece of music on one and the files you created would be more or less the same if/when you upgraded. Like a stock list of particular audio samples. GM samples only means that the samples were placed in the same order and corresponded to the same sound. I.e. the quality of the GM sample might be vastly superior from one product or company to the other, but it would still be called 'Slide Guitar' or 'Piano' or whatever and also remain in the same numerical position. It was very handy however as it did get a bit frustrating when you produced a piece of MIDI material on one piece of equipment and expected the samples to be arranged accordingly (i.e. the piano remained a piano) and suddenly your sequence became durge of odd percussion & unrelated instruments!
You can squeeze a surprising amount of decent stuff out of those keyboards if you are prepared to work at it, but you really need one with a save/memory function. Older models would simply lose any changes you made and on rebooting the keyboard you'd be back to square one! Yamaha FM Channels indeed!
Thanks for the info Parris. I had a feeling yamaha was using the same chip or a similar one in order to save a buck. There is a record button, but I'm still going through the manual so I don't know if it keeps the recording after being turned off. I almost gave this thing away last night, but once I heard what kind of sounds this thing produces I couldn't part with it. Now if only I could figure out how to play the phantasy star II theme I'd be set:dance:
I had a few Yamaha items such as a really nice Digital 24 track mixer, a pretty incredible sampler and some outboard MIDI stuff. One of the most utilised MIDI sound units was a TG-55, which looks basic and rubbish, but if you were lucky enough to get it with a memory card it was fantastic and had some superb 80's sounds if you worked at it. The presets were rubbish, but the programming was easy.
