Excellent For Its Nature

the qy70 is a songwriter's tool above all else, the foundation of its workflow being a song sequencer with a complimentary pairing of step editor and real-time recording, all mocked up by a pretty decent General MIDI sound engine for previewing tracks not yet realized, creating shells of songs which are then output to your cans or (god forbid) monitors in facsimile. once you hook it up to MIDI devices, however, it works very smoothly, one channel per track and relatively solid timing in my experience, holding a decent amount of memory - although you shouldn't try to clog it up with too many sysex dumps or else you'll have to back its memory up to a different MIDI sequencer with greater note capacity, which is what i tend to do. not great for loop-building workflows however because its looping adds a couple bars at the end for some reason, but fantastic if you're doing something detail-oriented.

oh, one last thing and it's that the General MIDI sounds on this thing are great to record into samplers and then like, chop or play chromatically. they have the perfect amount of unconvincing cheese but are high enough in quality, especially with some transformative effecting through something like a Quadraverb, that you can get a lot out of them nonetheless. not to mention it's probably the cheapest thing that does what it does and does it well on the market, so overall, i'd recommend.

Preferred Settings + Usage:

Yamaha QY70

This little guy is a monster for such a tiny sequencer! Its very easy to program and has some pretty decent sounds. I personally like the electronic drum set on this thing. Its very forgiving when programming and can even run on batteries ( last maybe 3 hours non stop programming). Its also nice that it can easily sit on top of a synth while in use. Really cool. I wish it would have had a lighted back display and an option for file storage besides the data filer for PC. But if you can find one for cheap they're lots of fun!