(review by Mikael Lundgren)
The successor of the popular but difficult QX1, the Yamaha QX3 featured a large backlit LCD, 3.5" disk drive and the ability to load and save midi bulk dumps. The eight midi outs of the QX1 were reduced to two on this unit giving it 32 effective channels. Very reliable, sturdy and with direct mute/unmute of patterns via dedicated buttons and indicators makes the QX3 a very good choice as a sequncer for the live act. Unfortunately, Yamaha preserved their rigid tape-recorder interface so this puppy is strictly linear.
MIDI, Tape Sync, Foot Switch
2xMIDI out, click, Tape Sync
Tape, MIDI w SPP.
3.5" DD Disk drive featuring MS-DOS compatible disk format.
512kb ~ 80.000 notes.
Real or step time MIDI recorder, arranger and playback unit. Can record and playback arbitrarily long sysex bulk dumps. No patterns, no working loop options. Job oriented menu hierarchy (hit JOB 16 ENTER to quantize track)
The QX3 is very quick to work with once you start to get the hang
of the job-oriented menu system which feels a bit arcane at first, but
is a fast way to work compared to nested menus. Because of its old age
the interface is modal requiring you to enter an edit mode to modify
data, but switching between modes are as quick as a button press.
A lot of dedicated buttons and indicators, and a *numerical keypad*
that was sadly lacking on the QX1. Nice feel in the jog/data wheel and
mute/unmute in real time using dedicated buttons add to the value of
the unit. Unfortunately there is only one loop option, and it does not
work; The loop hiccups a couple of milliseconds every 'restart' which
makes it unusable.
The unit is extremely reliable, but will hang if you feed it bad sysex
data. Volatile memory is erased when unit is turned off. Worth
mentioning as well is a very good step mode (the best I've seen?) and
a 'MIDI monitor mode' which shows exactly what data flows through the
unit.
Record a lot of variations on various tracks and mix them live with
the track buttons! Use it as a cheap alternative to a dedicated
librarian! Note that holding shift while selecting tracks to record
on, up to all 16 tracks can be selected for simultaneous recording!
The format of the disks are readable by MS-DOS, but the file format is
somewhat peculiar. Regarding bulk dumps, all files must have the
ending .Bxx with the first file on disk being .B01
and so on. To store three files on a disk for the MDR (Midi data
recorder) mode, they would need to be named fil1.B01, fil2.B02,
fil3.B03. Also the files themselves are not strictly pure sysex,
but the sysex is embedded into buffering data. To convert between pure
sysex and QX3 MDR format, please download the following C programs and
compile them on your platform!