Yamaha RX21
A budget drum machine that undercut the market without gutting the sounds. It has nine PCM voices, a useful step-time display, and a price tag that made it walk off the show floor. Contemporary coverage of Yamaha's mid-1980s instrument lineup, such as DB Magazine (May 1986, p.55), documents the company's aggressive push across its digital product ranges during this period.
Overview
The RX21 is Yamaha's digital rhythm machine, one of the company's RX-series drum machines. It arrived when digital drum technology was getting cheaper fast, and Yamaha built it to grab the affordable end of that market. The pitch was simple: a professional-grade drum machine at less than a semi-pro price.
The compromises that got the price down are real, but fewer than the number might suggest. The RX21 carries nine PCM-encoded voices: bass drum, snare, three toms, open and closed hi-hats, crash cymbal, and handclaps. Those are the same sounds used in Yamaha's RX15, just fewer of them. The machine can fire all nine voices at once, with one traditional exception: the open and closed hi-hats won't sound on the same beat.
What survived from the more expensive Yamaha machines is the accent facility. You can program an accent for any voice on any beat, which is useful for reinforcing a downbeat, turning a beat around, or adding sizzle to syncopations. The catch is that the accent is programmable per step rather than per voice. If two voices land on the same step and you want to accent one, the other gets accented too. Individual voice levels are settable, though not per pattern - another cost-cutting difference from the RX15.
The step-time writing system is where the RX21 punches above its price. You enter one voice at a time on each quantization step, and the steps loop while you build the pattern up gradually. Voices already recorded on a step play back as you move through, which most budget machines skip. The one major grouse in that review: the LCD isn't backlit, so you have to look at it straight on in decent light.
Patterns combine into songs, and the memory holds four songs, each up to 512 patterns. The reviewer's feeling was that more songs with fewer steps would have been more useful, both for live work and for pairing the RX21 with a MIDI sequencer. Eight songs of 256 steps, or sixteen of 128, would have cost little extra in software terms. Song mode gives you insert and delete, but not tempo changes or pattern repeats. Those live on the more expensive RX15.
Build quality, at least, didn't get sacrificed to the price.
At the British Music Fair, Yamaha's review unit was stolen off the stand. The reviewer arrived to find a mains lead and a pair of headphones dangling from the display, and the group gear manager explaining, red-faced, that the RX21 had just been nicked. A replacement was found. If a cheap RX21 turns up down the pub, the reviewer joked, call the authorities.
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