The RY30 is an elegant Drum Machine with advanced synth-like features that give it a really great sound. Its sounds come from a sample-based ROM synthesis engine belonging to Yamaha's SY/TG series of digital synthesizers. It's sounds are 16-bit, 48kHz PCM with digital multimode filters. It can store up to 100 user patterns and 20 songs, plus it comes with 100 preset patterns in various styles for instant drum accompaniment.

The RY30 has 90 waveforms, most of which are acoustic drum and percussion samples. There are an additional 6 analog waves including sine, triangle, and saw waves. Two oscillators can be layered per voice, and the voices can be pitched and played via MIDI. It has 16-note polyphony, but loses one voices to the metronome. There are eight touch sensitive pads dedicated to a certain type of drum sound. There are 96 drums sounds built-in (12 banks of eight). Additional sounds and patterns can be brought in via ROM cards for the RY30/RM50 as well as some SY/TG cards.

There are digital 12 and 24 db/oct hipass and lowpass filters which sound ok, and are great for contouring sounds. There are no effects except internal samples can be played in reverse. It also has four outputs that you can assign any drum sound to (kick, snare, hihat, etc). A nice little Modulation Wheel can adjust the pitch, decay time, pan, filter cutoff and the balance of the oscillators. As far as drum machines go, the RY30 is one of the nicest and biggest rivals of the venerable Roland R8.

rob

April 15, 2012 @ 5:01 am

This machine is very underated ,it is so easy to program...and is one of the best drum machine's i have used...i got mine on for£40 in full working order....the sound cards are hard to obtain...but even without them it is excellent...get one if you can...

plasticanimal

November 8, 2011 @ 2:41 am

I have the same dead mod wheel problem. If anyone knows how to fix let me know.
Great drum machine though. If I remember correctly you can send pitch data to this one and change the overall pitch while playing back/recording a pattern.

KitKat

May 5, 2011 @ 1:17 pm

Just make sure the parameter slider is set to what you want to edit (pitch, filter, etc) and use the modulation wheel when in recording mode.

miko

February 15, 2011 @ 8:22 am

This machine is awsome! Does anybody know when can I use this effects wheel? I have RY 30 about 4 hours and I still have no idea.

Individual8580

October 30, 2010 @ 5:57 am

Such an awesome drum machine. Since there are two waves per drum sound with a lot of parameters you can set individual for the waves it's possible to make some really sweet layered sounds. You can toss a x0x style kick sound to give bottom end to a PCM kick, create wide stereo hihats and make all sorts of interesting effects. Very 80's-90's industrial sound. The drum sounds on Skinny Puppy's Last Rights spring to mind when using this. Rich, 'dark' and this kind of digitaly warm sound. High frequencies are slightly rounded out. Somewhat Future Sound of Londonish too. Sounds fantastic when distorted with minimal tweaking. May not or ma be suitable for all styles but I absolutely love the sounds that you can get out of this. Sound editing can be a bit laborous but it's very rewarding.

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