The Yamaha QY70 was the very first piece of music hardware that I ever owned. I got it way back in 1997 right before going on a boring vacation–or at least it seemed boring at the time. I’d kill for a week alone at a Michigan beach house now.
I generally have trouble selling gear. Items have memories tied to them: how old I was, what I was doing in my life at the time, what excitement or joy it brought me. This poor device went untouched in the basement of my parents’ house for over a decade. But, since getting back into making music outside of a DAW, the QY70 has found a new life.
Here, I am not using any of its sequencer functions. Instead, the OP-Z is doing all of the sequencing. At first I tried doing this in pattern mode on the QY70, but for some reason the device is designed to receive MIDI on all channels for the track that is selected. I was about to scrap the whole plan, but decided to take a look at the manual and discovered that song mode receives MIDI on each track from the corresponding channel (channel 1 to track 1, channel 2 to track 2, etc.). Not sure why it was designed that way, but glad I figured it out.
I then had the QY70 run through the Empress Effects Zoia for some ping-pong delay and ghost reverb. I ended up with this somewhat meditative piece. Close your eyes and ignore the fact that the first delay hit in the right channel causes some stereo imbalance.
