What are you passionate about? If you are like most musicians, you are dedicated to making better music. You want to improve your sound and find new paths to creativity. Of course much of that has to come from within the musician, but it can also be spurred on by a new instrument or piece of gear. That’s why you see guitar players with roomfuls of guitars, amps and effects. That’s why you find keyboard players with stacks of keyboards and modules. That’s why innovation is so critical to the creative process and the music business. Yamaha breeds innovation in the technology area, where you would expect to find it. But we also constantly innovate in products that have been around for hundreds of years like guitars, drums and pianos. There are four recent developments that you will see on products in 2003 that exemplify Yamaha innovation.

Think you can tell when that part on a record is a synth or the real instrument? Well, you won’t be so sure after hearing Yamaha’s new Mega Voice technology. Mega Voices are found in our flagship Tyros portable keyboard and the just-announced Motif ES workstation keyboards. They add the subtle nuances of a real instrument—things like fret noise, string noise and slapping—even the hum of an unplugged guitar cable. Combined with switched multi-samples and MIDI performances by real players, your ears will be fooled by the stunning realism of Mega Voices.

Networking is a core part of today’s computer technology. Yamaha created mLAN as an industry standard protocol for music networking. MLan makes it possible to network audio and MIDI in a studio, stage or home setting over a single Firewire cable. You can see the elegance of mLan in the new 01x mLAN Mixing Studio.

You would think that everything that could be done to an electric guitar had been done. Watching people play would confirm your opinion, as you see the same few guitars over and over again. The Yamaha AES series is changing all that. The new AES body style was created by our team at Yamaha Guitar Development in “No Ho” (that’s North Hollywood, California). The AES is fresh and edgy and being adopted quickly for its aggressive sound and technology developments like the straight string pull, which makes it brutally hard to pull the AES out of tune.

Drummers are very particular about their sound and always willing to look at the latest and greatest. The latest and greatest in the drum world is the Yamaha Nouveau lug. The Nouveau lug was designed to only contact the shell at one point, allowing the shell to resonate freely. The Nouveau lug also makes changing drumheads a breeze—something everyone in the band will appreciate.

Enjoy this issue of All Access; I hope it ignites your passion for music, as much as new, innovative products ignite the music business.

Sincerely,

Tom Sumner
General Manager
Pro Audio and Combo Division
Yamaha Corporation of America