Yamaha RX7

A hundred voices, twenty-four keys

The library goes beyond the usual kick, snare and cymbal. Howard Massey's February 1988 review found ambient drums, pitched instruments, reversed sounds, a camera shutter and voices among the hundred. Its broad palette was useful because the machine let the player reassign those sounds to the keys, or spread a single voice across twelve keys at different pitches. What looks like a conventional drum-pad row can become a compact keyboard for one sound. [rx7massey88]

The more interesting action happens after assignment. An RX7 event can hold its own level, pitch, decay and pan setting. A repeated drum can change character or position within a bar without requiring a second recording of that drum. The voice controls also include an LFO for pitch or amplitude modulation. These are not claims that every recorded RX7 beat used such edits; they explain the options Yamaha put under the player's fingers. [rx7manual; rx7massey88]

The review describes real-time and step entry, editable events, repeatable passages and tempo or volume changes in a song. That makes a pattern more than a grid of identical strikes. One note can enter softly, another can bend away, and a later event can shift to the other side of the stereo image. [rx7massey88]

The bargain built into the back panel

For all the control inside the RX7, the finished sound left on a stereo pair. The rear panel also offered a separate click output, MIDI connections, footswitch input and a cassette interface. It did not offer a separate audio output for every drum. Massey regarded that as a significant studio limitation: processing one voice externally could affect other voices sharing the same side of the stereo mix. Nor could the player enter the voice-editing screen to adjust level or pan while a pattern or song played. [rx7massey88]

The RX7's internal movement becomes more understandable against that constraint. A musician could compose the panning and dynamics into the pattern, but had less freedom to rebalance individual voices on a mixing desk later. The machine's editing was ambitious; the physical outputs forced decisions. [rx7manual; rx7massey88]

The manual’s Effect job repeats a voice two, three or four times, with adjustable pitch, level and pan differences. The delay setting runs from zero to 500 milliseconds: at zero, the copies can sound together rather than following one another. It reshapes the existing voice, not a new audio recording. Voice edits must be stored before another voice is selected, or the working values are lost; the manual also provides an edit-recall job. [rx7manual; rx7massey88]

Paper, memory and time

Yamaha's collection notes that patterns and edited voices could be stored on optional RAM cartridges. This belongs alongside the cassette interface in the history of the instrument: the work a musician put into a pattern had to be kept somewhere. [rx7museum; rx7manual]

The period press puts a useful boundary around price. Bacon did not have a confirmed UK launch price in December 1987, and Massey's February review still said price to be announced. A March 1989 dealer page contains later asking prices, including an ex-demo offer. Those numbers describe a different moment and different condition; they should never be dressed up as the original retail price. [yamahabacondec87; rx7massey88; mtmarch89rx7ads]

The machine that stayed

Reverb's 2018 studio profile reports that Ian Pooley still used his first drum machine, received at Christmas in 1987. In his 2019 GROOVE interview he describes the RX7 as a combined Christmas and birthday gift, and remembers pitching, shortening and layering its drums while seeking the Detroit sound he admired. The photograph shows his later owned instrument; neither account assigns it to a named release. [pooleyreverb2018; groove-ian-pooley-rx7-2019]

Cinthie names an RX7 in her 2021 studio interview, alongside her preferred TR-909 and other drum machines. She describes jamming and recording hardware, but does not attach the Yamaha to an individual track. The remaining release accounts in the recording register distinguish whole-project use from sampling the RX7 into another instrument; those roles should remain separate. [rx7-cinthie-musicradar-2021; recording-evidence]

Future Music's retrospective of Massive Attack's Protection names the RX7 and Akai S1000 in the album's core setup. Mushroom's accompanying quotation explains the title track's sampled hi-hat loop, programmed James Brown snares and home-studio arrangement, but does not assign those sounds to the Yamaha. The equipment identification is the publication's narration, not a direct RX7 statement by Mushroom. [yamaha-rx7-massive-attack-protection-musicradar]

Argiflex describes another role for the machine on Summer Is a Relative Term II, released on 4 May 2012. Its drums were sampled into and sequenced with a Korg Electribe ES-1 mkII, alongside synth lines from an EA-1. Here the RX7 supplied the drum material, while the Korg handled the subsequent sequencing. [argiflex-rx7-summer-relative-term-bandcamp]

The RX7 combines a broad fixed sample library with detailed event editing and stereo output. A musician can shape a hit inside the pattern, but separate outboard processing remains constrained by those shared outputs. Its documented later uses belong to particular studios and projects, rather than proving one universal RX7 sound.