I initially assumed that the BPM of the Yamaha QY100 was controlled by a single byte. It turns out it’s actually controlled by two. This has led to the realization that the sequencer’s BPM can be pushed much higher than originally thought.
The advantage of working at high BPMs is the amount of resolution the project has for creative input. Picture this, you are creating a song intended to be 100 BPM… You scale your song up to double (200 BPM), triple (300 BPM), quadruple (400 BPM), quintuple (500 BPM), sextuple (600 BPM), septuple (700 BPM), octuple (800 BPM), nonuple (900 BPM), or even decuple (1000 BPM), then stretch the pattern accordingly such that the perceived BPM is still 100 BPM. Each time the BPM is multiplied, the available resolution is too allowing you to craft much more intricate beats.
Furthermore, each of the QY100s built-in samples take on a whole new texture at high execution speeds, especially once effects are applied. Take a listen to a few quick tracks I put together:
One caveat to working with a high BPM is that the number of notes must stay tamed. Overloading a project with notes while at these extreme BPMs can cause the device displays to temporarily freeze, accompanied by amusing and sometimes beautiful cacophonies which get stuck in an endless loop. Here are some of those recordings:
The maximum allowable BPM has yet to be determined. Since there are two bytes controlling the BPM, an attempt was made to inject a hexadecimal value of FFFF. Theoretically this should have resulted in a BPM of 65535. However, this file would not load onto the device. For this reason the possible BPMs will have to be discovered by trial-and-error and will take some more digging.
In the meantime have fun building your own QY100 pattern at a high BPM by loading up the user styles provided.
Loading the .Q1P file onto your QY100
Simply download the .Q1P style file, place the file on a Smart Media Card, then load it onto your Yamaha QY100 music sequencer.
Follow the Readme for more detailed instructions.
