Welcome

I am a multi-instrumentalist. I play electric, acoustic, and 12-string guitars, mandolin, violin, harmonica on a somewhat regular basis. I also play keyboards, piano and button-box accordions, trombone, euphonium, and recorders from time to time. When I can get my hands on them, I have been known to play a drum set, saxophone, highland bagpipes, and nose flute (fortunately, this doesn't happen too often!). I am not afraid to try any new musical instrument that might be called for in a song to give it the right feel. While this may be a noble musical endeavor, it gets hard on the budget, fills up my house, and decreases my practice time on each instrument.

In an effort to curb my appetite for new instruments, I recently bought a Yamaha WX5 wind controller and VL70-m tone generator. The WX5 looks like an electronic clarinet and the VL70-m allows it to sound like just about any instrument you can think of! The great part for me is that they are both small, light, and the WX5 is extremely easy to play. The challenge has been learning how to tweak the VL70-m to make it sound exactly how I want...

The VL70-m was first introduced by Yamaha in 1996. As far as I know, the ones you can buy today have not really changed since 1996. Probably the main change is Yamaha's lack of support for this product! The manual still lists "“http://www.yamaha.co.jp./english/xg/html/libhm.html" as the place to go for voice editing software, although the website has been long abandoned. And since VL70-m was issued before USB really took off and before things like Windows XP and Vista, a little support would be a very helpful thing!

I have been scouring the Internet to get help, and what I am finding is that there are quite a few people who picked up where Yamaha left off supporting this product, but not a good index to pull all of the references together in one place. My intent is to create that reference here.

This site is starting off as a blog to make it easy for me to publish, but eventually I hope someone will offer to host this somewhere. Feel free to add comments to any post. If you found any value, I would appreciate a comment. You do not need an ID, password, or e-mail address to leave comments.