$140
Hi all - your chance to get your hands on the flagship drum machine of Yamaha in the 80s. There was no more fully spec'd version and this beast cost an enormous amount new.
Reposting this now as it really has to go. $140 is about a hundred less than I paid & far less than you'll pay on ebay, not to mention shipping from Japan...
Separate outs mean you can make a beat and then stream all the parts separately into your DAW and compress etc separately. The really wild thing about this machine is the insane amount of control you have over the playback of the crunchy PCM samples - pitching them down to settings of, like, "-3600" - whatever that is - for some crunchy digital dirt and as one reviewer put it "deep dark digital roars". Or upwards for hats etc. You can also control the envelopes in several stages allowing pseudo-reverb (my term!) with long decays etc, and even loop samples. Dropping the attack leads to some serious low-fi wubby action on the pitched-down sounds.
Possibly the best feature in my opinion is the ability to make very long loops - 8 or 16 bars. This allows much more complex and evolving rhythms than for example the machinedrum where you are pretty much limited to 4 bars without dropping everything to half speed.
Another great feature is 12 sliders - one per voice - so you can jam out with just the RX5 in true early Warp style...
I did a couple of songs almost entirely on this very machine, with a few effects in my DAW and a couple of sampled vocals. Notably all the bass and drums are from the RX5:
go to soundcloud and find me, machine_user_001 and check out "not in words" & "Morant Bay St Thomas" (& my latest exploit "casio rave" but that does have a sampled kick and hats)
Now I'm skint AGAIN or I'd hold onto it. So here's your chance for some punchy 80s digital action.
NOTE: I have been happily using this drum machine to make tracks for a while now. However for the sake of accuracy, several of the drum pads on the lower two rows do not function. This is not a major problem since they are in pairs and one of each pair functions, all along the row - as in, you can still play 12 individual voices which are all routed to separate outputs. Enough for any man! To be clear - enough pads work to trigger all of the sounds at once (one of each of the pairs along the bottom twelve pairs of buttons) and one form each pair along the bottom work. So that's one button per voice, and you have one slider per button i.e. it makes essentially no difference. One of those machines with so much capability that it has redundancy!
Probably it's just a case of cleaning the contacts - I never found the need - never bothered to really check it out or even try canned air or anything. I still haven't ruled out it just being an actual setting - it seems suspicious to me that all the buttons you need, work - all the pairs with one voice, one button works - and then the last two pairs of buttons (tambourine/claps and shaker/cowbells) where there are two voices - both buttons work. With such a deep machine it's possible there's a menu or setting I never found to switch all the voice buttons back on.
Basically come around & try it out & you'll see that it sell works absolutely fine for making tunes. Selling reluctantly to raise funds rather than any problems with machine. Apart from that, slight wear as shown but generally pretty good condition - as seen in photos.
