Vintage Synth Explorer

Yamaha • SU-700 Loop Factory

One of the coolest sampler / sequencer music boxes around and it's from Yamaha! Yamaha has officially stepped into the dance genre with this one! The SU-700 is an all-in-one music production studio of the AKAI MPC-3000 type. But it adds many cool features to make any DJ, musician or hobbyist an instant sampling and sequencing techno wizard! The first thing you'll notice is its ability to auto-match beats and loops to the same tempo for instant music making without the hassles!

The sampler section is sophisticated enough for even the highest grade of professional studio work. Analog and digital inputs with variable sampling rates and bit rates! Sounds coming into the SU-700 can be processed instantly through the filters and effects without even needing to be sampled. Sampled sounds can be auto truncated, auto looped, auto beat matched and auto time-sliced! Each sample is stored in one of the pads from which you can trigger it, edit and so on. The sequencer section is also pretty fly whether you're gonna program every note in or create a live performance in real time! Build and drop out tracks in real time while editing, filtering and tweaking other parameters!

For grooving, the SU-700 is well equipped. There are 12 knobs providing access to all the important edit parameters for real-time tweaks. These knobs can even be individually assigned to each of the sample pads for specialized tweaks! There's a ribbon control for added enjoyment. A Groove function to vary your beats, lots of excellent effects (3 simultaneous). Resonant low, high and band pass filters and a flexible LFO make for great filtering and sweeping effects. The SU-700 is ideal for any DJ or musician looking for a simplified but incredibly professional way to make your own killer dance music - live or in the studio! It is used by Speedy J.

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NEEL

Posted 287 days ago

its a great part of a song good quality sound, and someone said it doesnt quantize? dude the thing quantizes.
just get it cheaper than a mpc since the mpc is more capable, its the kind of synth you have in synch with other machines, one thing thats great is the ability to sample thing quicker than any other machine i have. just start the basis in the yellow pads on the left, and you will always have a cool loop to drop in the song your making with the other machines. dont buy crack and buy synths.

Olaf Apholz

Posted 306 days ago

The SU700 is the simple and efficient way to rock with loops.

It very importet to use an full expanded one:
-64(+4MB internal) MB Ram
-AIEB1 Audio-Expansion
-ASIB1 SCSI-Expansion
if possible remove the internal Floppy and change it with a ZIP-Drive

With a second external USB-ZIP-Drive, you can transport easy Samples from PC or Mac to the SU700.
All my records are produced by this way.
To read with the SU WAV, Akai and Aiff-File you need a late produced SU.
I bought my SU in the year 2001.

Steve Cooke

Posted 316 days ago

The SU-700 was a disappointment to me after I bought one back in 1999. It was easy to use, which was good because otherwise I might not have understood its limitations in time to swap it for a sampler that was up to the job. The problem is the SU-700 allows no step-time programming, only working in real-time. While that's OK for ideas on the fly, it's hopeless if you need to edit those ideas to construct a track with rock-solid timing. The only way of introducing new loops and then taking them out is the mute on/off button for each channel. You have to do that live. It will record what you do but there's no way of editing that, not even a basic quantise function, to ensure that each loop comes in or out at exactly the right moment. That might do for a DJ when every performance is a one-off, but it's useless if you want to do any recording. I was staggered that such basic editing functions had been left out of the design.

Angry Muslim

Posted 317 days ago

After thousands of dollars wasted, I finally found the perfect setup.

ASR X Pro
MPC2kxl
SP505
Su700

All of which are tracked into Ableton Live.

This thing is wonderful. A true delight to work with. Beatmakers, don't overlook its 4 banks of 4 "free pads". Dare I say, sp1200 killer?

I'm looking to get a scsi or zip drive.

victorass

Posted 444 days ago

That`s the beautiful 80-s looking box for creating music. Love it, own about 4 years. Mine has the SCSI and iOmega Zip for 256 Mb. To work with floppy is a headache. I`m taking the horrible waveform from my analog modular synths dropping it in SU700 and the fun begins!

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