Yamaha RY-10

This is an ancient DRUM MACHINE and I'm fortunate enough to have laid my hands on one through "inheritance". Compared to the DRUM MACHINES out there today this one is useless! So why do I, and so many other people out there, love and treasure it so much? Its great for lacing ideas as you get them. It has an easy to use interface with both step sequence recording and real-time recording. You only have three goups of sounds to choose from: Drum, Perc and Bass. In the drum and perc group you have up to a combined number of 90+ sounds to choose from when creating something. The bass will only offer 12 'bass' sounds though. Its super portable and can run on either six AA sized batteries or from a DC adapter on your mains. Being so old its sounds are also very edgey and 8-16bit sounding. Great for making music with an old school feel or just to phatten up modern drum, perc or bass sounds. Anything that you make can be stored onboard the machine in one of fifty pattern storage slots. These patterns in the slots can be linked up using the 'SONG' function to make tull length songs ready for playback. You are also given 'Fill-in' storeage slots to store any fill-ins you program onto the machine. These add quite the spicee to any composition. Things aren't all good though. As composers we can tend to get carried away in our creativity when programing music and its frustrating that the RY-10 is limited to Drums, Perc, and Bass. You can never create a detailed flawless track on it and on many occasions, because of its limited sounds and quantizing abilities, have failed to transfer a musical idea on to the RY-10. SO...is it a must have? No! Its a nice to have. If you have extra money you'd like to spend on a good cheap old Drum machine this is the best investment to make. If on the other hand you are still trying to establish yourself and your studio save your money and buy something that you really need.