Yamaha Producer Series "Production Values." ad, Keyboard 1984

Yamaha Producer Series "Production Values." full page colour advertisement from the back cover of the February 1984 issue of Keyboard Magazine.

Interesting fact: It's 1984, and yet this appears to be only the second Yamaha synthesizer advertisement to appear on the back cover of Keyboard Magazine. But once Yamaha got this ad onto the back cover, it kept it there pretty regularly from February all the way through to October.

It seems that Yamaha decided it wasn't exactly through with the promotion of its Producer Series line of products. But instead of reanimating those fun, illustrated ads from a few years ago, they decided it might be better to switch gears a bit and begin promoting both the old and new Producer Series gear towards the professional studio musician. And probably a good thing, because you can't really roller skate with a four-track recorder. At least not this Yamaha four-track. 

It was time to bring those roller skaters back into the studio to cut all those tracks people had been working on for the last two years with their CS01 synthesizer, MA10 headphone amp, MM10 portable mixer and MH10 headphones. They are all still available as part of the Producer Series, so they must have been selling okay.

But the bulk of this advertisement's ad-copy is all about the new studio gear:

• MT44 4-track cassette recorder.
• MM30 4x2 mixer with built-in analog delay, 7 band equalizer.
• RB30 system rack with patch bay and accessories compartment.

I really became intrigued with this 4-track system after seeing this ad a few days ago. I loved my Tascam four-track - I cut my teeth in music production on that that thing. But this system with patch bay and mixer sounds and looks really cool.

It didn't take long for a Google search to bring up that RB30 manual and it turns out the RB30 is the Ikea equivalent of studio furniture. It makes me want to find all the parts and recreate it even more! Gah!

Also - I found a great little German blog that included some good pics. Google's Chrome browser with its Translation feature is *awesome*. 

Almost as intriguing as this studio system is the one other piece of gear they kind of just slipped in here. As far as I can tell, it wasn't part of the original line up of Producer Series gear, but yet never really got any promotion on its own whenever it came out.

I'm talking about that MR10 drum machine! It kind of just got thrown into this ad

Well, in Yamaha's defense, it has been two years since that last batch of ads ran and they were releasing products as fast as humanly possible. And then some. They probably just didn't have enough ad space. But, we can get an idea of when that MR10 drum machine was actually released from when it appeared in the Spec Sheet section of the magazine in February 1983.

It actually appeared as part of a long series of Yamaha new gear, including mixers and power amplifiers, but those other items were not part of the Producer Series (but maybe precursors to them?), so I've only included the drum machine info:

"Yamaha Drum Machine, Mixers & Power Amps. The Yamaha MR10 is a battery-operated rhythm unit with twelve preset rhythms, plus five finger pads for playing live fills or entire rhythm parts. Preset rhythms, which can be combined with one another for greater variety, include disco, jazz, swing, waltz, march, and several Latin rhythms. In addition to the master volume, there are separate volume controls for the bass drum and cymbal. A tuning control governs the pitch of the snare drum, high tom-tom, and low tom-tom, and a tempo control governs the speed of the automatic rhythms. automatic fills can be activated every four or eight bars if desired...."

What the devil? No price?

Boooooo! 

That's enough Producer Series for now. On to something else in the next blog post.