Fancy being able to control pitch bend without using your hands? No problem! Yamaha offered a 2nd expression pedal which was spring-loaded to the centre position. The cost for this essential accessory was around £20. Most professionally used HS-8's will probably have one of these fitted (mine does)!

Additional AWM voices came from two sources. Yamaha produced a series of 12 ROM packs which you could slot into the three Voice Pack slots. Or, you could take the MIDI route and purchase Yamaha's AVS-10 expander. This product came from the days when sampled sounds were a rarity rather than the norm, and you could get away with putting 12 sounds in a box and charging £300 for it! It featured upper, lower and pedal sections, with 15-note polyphony across the upper and lower, and monophonic bass.

If you wanted some new FM voices, Yamaha produced a couple of FM Voice Packs which featured over 100 sounds for about £40.

New rhythms could be found on Yamaha's Rhythm Packs. You got 4 banks of 16 rhythms on each pack for about £40.

Found making your own registrations a chore? Yamaha and a vast array of third party developers produced registration disks and RAM packs for varying costs. If you're still interested then take a look at our (forthcoming) software section here at GOTN.

For an organ, the "organ" sounds on the HS-8 were pretty lame. Help was at hand in the shape of the Yamaha CVS-10 combination voice expander. Costing around £549 new this was no cheap device, but you could probably pick one up now for about £100. If you buy no other expander for the HS-8 (or for that matter, any other MIDI keyboard since it's fully configurable and sends SYS-EX data if asked), buy one of these. The unit features "digital" drawbars - all 9 footages - and can store up to 64 user sounds. With 7-note polyphony on each of the keyboards and a monophonic bass section, plus complete integration with the HS-8 and full compatibility with the MDR-series disk recorders it's a doddle to use. The sound is very clean and very usable. Suffice to say, I own one of these units, and use it virtually all the time. Lovely!

Copyright © 1999 Gilly on the Net
Most recent revision 6 January 1999