I decided to make one (1) music. It's called "Title Screen Music From An Amiga Game Your Older Brother Used To Play" because it felt like a fitting name. It's nominally synthwave but there's probably some elements of other genres mixed in too.
This was done on my Yamaha QY100 and recorded on my Yamaha MT4X. I mostly made it to serve as elevator music during less interesting parts of my videos, which I did on my latest upload and I think it works well for that.
Who would have thought that in this, the year of our lord Two Thousand and Twenty Six, I'd be purchasing a pack of brand new cassette tapes.
The eagle-eyed among you might notice that these are Type I tapes and not the High-Bias Type II tapes that this 4-track recorder is designed to use. You see, this is deliberate: not only are the Type I tapes much cheaper, and thus less worrisome to mess around with, but the fact that they're the incorrect tape means that they'll have much more distortion than the correct Type II tapes.
And giving things a quick test, the audio I recored to this tape, when played back, sounds... really, really good. Like I've got some proper nice headphones and I can't hear a bit of distortion, hiss or really anything but the exact same audio pouring back into my ears that I recorded onto it.
That might sound like a good thing, but 90% of the point of buying this 4-track was to take advantage of its character and colouring of the audio, and if it's reproducing the input nearly perfectly then it's not exactly adding a whole lot of colour.
But all is not lost, there are techniques that can be employed to increase the distortion and noise levels. Turning off the dbx system, slowing the tape to 4.8 cm/s instead of the 9.5 cm/s setting, and messing up the gain staging and recording levels will do a lot to make the sound properly crunchy. And, honestly, being able to scale things down from a starting point of "almost CD quality" means I'll have lots of range to dial things in to my liking.
I do also have a Type II cassette on its way, which is about 3.5x the price of these Type I cassettes, so it'll be interesting to see if it responds differently to being driven into distortion.
I am kind of impressed, though. Having only experienced cassette tape through basic car head units, cheap walkman knock-offs, and bargain basement radio cassette players, I never really had the chance to experience the full quality that cassette tape could deliver.
I've been in a bit of a groovebox groove lately, what with stumbling across some good deals on an MC-303 and an MC-505, and wouldn't you know it but a Yamaha QY-100 popped up with my four favourite words attacked: For Parts or Repair.
The unit was reported as not booting up, and when I powered it on I could indeed verify that the screen just came up blank and the unit was unresponsive, however once I held down the right key combo I was able to get it into DFU mode (which stands for "Device Fucked Up Firmware Update") and so it likely just had some data corruption in its flash memory.
Oh and it's also missing the trim piece around the SmartMedia card slot.
I'll model up and 3D print a replacement for that bit later, after I make sure I can actually get this thing running.
So to fix the firmware corruption, all I should need to do is load up the firmware MIDI file into something like Sysex Librarian and pour it into the midi port once it's booted into DFU mode.
Except that actually doesn't work at all due to Sysex Librarian completely ignoring the midi message timing and blasting the entire file at full data rate while the system is busy doing stuff like pre-erasing the flash chip.
So instead I took the advice of Paul Carbone and downloaded XGWorks to my wintendo, an app that apparently hasn't been updated since the mid 90s, which is about the same time period as when this groovebox was made.
I gotta say, of all the MIDI playback programs in the world, this is one of them. I'm pretty sure that using another more modern midi player (rather than a sysex tool) would have also worked just fine, but the firmware update was already installing so I just went with it.
And about 20 minutes later: success!
So, onwards we go to Yamaha number 2, after a brief grass-touching break.
Grass: touched.
So again, this was just a coincidental find. I had been pondering the idea of picking up a 4-track cassette recorder like the (in)famous Tascam Portastudio 424, but since those have got a bit of a cult following they tend to command a bit of a premium on the used market these days.
However, Tascam wasn't the only company making 4-track cassette recorders, as you might have guessed by now, and the Yamaha MT4X was a direct competitor and generally an even match for the Tascam.
And wouldn't you know it, I heard those four sweet words: For Parts or Repair.
It was obviously filthy and the plastic was a bit scratched, and much to my dismay the input jacks seemed to have very poor connectivity. So, apart it comes.
Getting the main board out of a mixer like this is always a challenge, and Yamaha made this extra fun by using these plastic push-rivets to secure the rear face plate. Thankfully the center pin can be removed by just prying under the edge with a knife and then the rivet slides right out.
Naturally every knob has to come off, and after 30-odd years some of them are a bit more stuck than others. This is extra annoying since the knobs are recessed into the front panel by quite a bit. Thankfully I have a tool for that.
And then finally the main mixer board is out.
Time to give it cancer.
So with everything cleaned and lubricated, I reassembled the unit only to discover that the input jacks still had a dramatically poor connection. I poked around, scratched my head, and then realized that actually the mixer was just fine; it was the RCA to 1/4 TRS adapters I had used to connect my SK-88 Pro to the mixer which were to blame. Figures.
Anyway, I pulled up Amazon and ordered up some RCA to 1/4 TRS cables and threw the adapters in the trash, then gave the mixer a little spit-shine and I gotta say it came out looking pretty nice.
It could still use a bit more detailing but it's good enough for now.
And now I just need to find a cassette to stick in here... which will probably be its own adventure.
