A versatile woodwind synth 
by Frank Rebeka from Northern Illinois, September 2008
Music Background:  Theater Musician

The VL70-m has been around since the mid-90s. There are many things to both love and dislike about this synth. Mostly, I think it's a great product. I bought mine to use with the Yamaha WX5 Wind Controller.

The things I dislike (get that out of the way first):

There are four banks of voices. Preset 1 (128 preset voices primarily for keyboard), Preset 2 (128 preset voices for a wind controller), Custom (six voices), and internal (64 memory locations for user edited voices). Most of the preset voices are worthless for musical performance.

There are six "Custom" presets. Instead of assigning six really great voices to showcase this bank, Yamaha chose to program them with the six most unusable, worthless, noise-junk sound-effects they had. The only way to edit them is with a PC and the "Expert Editor" applicaton software included with the synth. I haven't played with the "Expert Editor" yet so I don't know what it is capable of doing. (I'll have to do a followup.)

It's klunky to change presets in real-time unless you have your sound-set programmed into the internal bank. To solve this problem, I purchased a MIDI foot controller and programmed it to send bank and program change messages make the voice selections.

Things I like:
The voices that are good are really good. Blow softly and you hear air; as you blow harder, the sound starts to come in; get louder and the timbre changes to match. The good sounds are "alive" with a lot of the nuance of a real instrument. It won't replace a real instrument--you're still constrained by the parameters of the synthesizer--but it's surprisingly good.

If you have the time and inclination to tweak sounds, you can model some interesting sounds by controlling the physical aspects of pressure, embrochure, tounging, filters, and lots of other parameters. To get an overview, you can visit the Yamaha website and download a copy of the manual and tone list.

I play in the orchestra pit for several community theater groups in my area. People are always asking me about my WX5 and VL70-m and are amazed by the variety of sounds I produce during a show. It's a unique combination and truly versatile when you need to create a lot of different sounds.

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