A Yamaha QY100 Page

A superb addition to your outfit is a Line6 Pocket Pod

Update Rom Upgrade to 1.37, with Anvil Studio, and Data Filer, and Instruction/Warning PDF file 21st Feb 2011

If it's not broken, then don't "mend" it.

Update with Battery Fail solution 26 April 2010

Update 18 September 2009 now with Powerpoint Tabs + MP3s

Update 16 November 2007

I find the Yamaha QY100 to be a lot of fun, both to program and to use. I realise that there are probably much better software solutions for use with a laptop computer. However I still prefer the QY100.

If anyone out there has any files they'd like posted here, or is getting some use from these files, then I'd be pleased to hear from you.

To learn to Re-Set the QY100 completely, equivalent to CTRL-ALT-DEL on a PC, click here.

Email to John.L.Masterman 2004

These are files created by me on the QY100 for use by a band I belong to. They represent effort upon my part and the accompanying Tab files represent effort on someone else's. Since the QY100 permits you to adapt or adopt any parts of it's sequence files, and customise more or less everything, they are offered to you for your own use in your QY system upon the basis that they are what they are and no criticism or censure is asked for or required. If and when you improve upon them then at least I have saved you a bit of work and gained more satisfaction from mine thereof. Likewise I make no apology for the choice of music. That is personal and a matter between me and the QY and the rest of the band. :-))

The QY material is presented here in ALL files. Those of you familiar with the QY system will appreciate the simplicity of this approach rather than individual files. Those who do not, might like to e-mail me for assistance or probably better-still, join the QY70/QY100 group on Yahoo and ask for advice there.

It is fairly easy to separate the tracks and make a new ALL file of your own using individual songs. Just remember to save the track you want as a SONG file and also remember to save the STYLE from the track as well. When you come to make your new ALL file, load in the SONG file and then enter the STYLE mode and load in the STYLE. Then remember to alter the STYLE calls in the SONG's Pattern to the new number used in this ALL file.

It is also possible to output the tracks from the QY100 as Midi + XG tracks to use with other midi-compatible instruments. Henry uses midi + XG versions in his Yamaha PSR3000 keyboard. All that is needed is for you to select the track you wish to output by going to it in the QY, then select Job Number 20 to EXPAND BACKING. Now save the SONG file out as either SMF (Standard Midi File) or SMF + XG (Standard Midi File plus XG). If the instrument you want to use the file on is XG compliant, and most Yamaha instruments are, then use SMF + XG.

		Song Titles
All File Data 1	Tab files for All Data 1	Down in The Meadow (Marilyn Monroe version)	The Hollywood Waltz (Eagles)
		Slip Slidin' Away (P.Simon version)	The House That You Live In (G.Lightfoot)
		Cotton Jenny (G.Lightfoot)	Wherefore and Why (G.Lightfoot)
		Blue Moon	We Can Swing Together (Lindisfarne)
		Onward (Yes)	Turn a Deaf Ear (Lindisfarne)
		Sundown (G.Lightfoot)	The Clear White Light (Lindisfarne)
		Me and You and a Dog Named Boo	The Road to Kingdom Come (Lindisfarne)
		Well Alright (Blind Faith)	Did She Mention My Name (G.Lightfoot)
		What Am I Doing Hangin' Round? (Monkees)	Never Too Close (G.Lightfoot)
		Foul Owl on the Prowl (From In the Heat Of The Night)	Song for a Winter's Night (G.Lightfoot)
All File Data 2	Tab Files for All Data 2	Smokey and the Bandit (Jerry Reid)	Take it Easy (Eagles)
		The Hangman and The Papist (Strawbs)	Reason to Believe (Rod Stewart)
		Up Ride With The Kelpie (Jethro Tull)	You Wear It Well (Rod Stewart)
		Mandolin Wind (Rod Stewart)	Heavy Fuel (Dire Straits)
		Lazy Day (Moody Blues)	Forever Autumn (Moody Blues)
		So Deep Within You (Moody Blues)	For My Lady (Moody Blues)
		Send Me No Wine (Moody Blues)	Never Comes The Day (Moody Blues)
		Dear Diary (Moody Blues)	One More Time (Lynyrd Skynyrd)
		Don't Ask Me No Questions (Lynyrd Skynyrd)	Poison Whiskey (Lynyrd Skynyrd)
		Under The Boardwalk (Bruce Willis/Temptations)	Love Potion Number 9 (Drifters/Searchers)
All File Data 3	Tab Files for All Data 3	Folkways Files for the QY	Folkways Files for the QY
		Gasoline Alley	Ramblin' Gamblin' Man
		The Intoxicated Rat	Prospecting Dream
		Lily Of The West	Life Is A Toil
		Midnight Special (from Cool Hand Luke)	Hobo's Lullaby
		Don't Let Your Deal Go Down	Erie Canal
		Danville Girl (Country Version)	Danville Girl (Waltz Version)
		Thats enough Folkways for now	Thats enough Folkways for now
		Jambalaya (great tune for beginners)	When A Man Loves A Woman
		What A Day For A Day-Dream	San Francisco (McKenzie)
		16 Tons (Tennessee Ernie Ford)	The Time Of The Preacher (Nelson)
		Have You Ever Seen The Rain (CCR ver)
Henry's QY Folk Songs
Some of Henry's favourite folk songs that he created with his QY, and asked me to add to our little collection
Folk ALL file	Tab Files for Folk	Whiskey in the Jar	Wild Rover
		The Leaving of Liverpool	The Fields of Athenry
		I'll Tell Me Ma	The Skye Boat Song
		Maggie
All File Data 5	Tab Files for All Data 5	Down On The Corner (Creedence)	Lodi (Creedence)
		Lookin Out My Back Door (Creedence)	A Daisy A Day (Judd Strunk)
		Ballad Of Jed Clampett (Flatt & Scruggs)	Song For Everyone (Creedence)
		Long As I Can See The Light (Creedence)	Brown Eyed Girl (Creedence)
		Battle Of New Orleans (Donnegan)	Ticket Heaven (Dire Straits)
		Country Roads	After The Thrill Is Gone (Eagles)
		Summertime Dream (Gordon Lightfoot)	The Watchman (Gordon Lightfoot)
		Who'll Stop The Rain (Creedence)	Love Steet (Doors)
		Up Around The Bend (Creedence)	Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves (Cher)
		A Whole Lot Better (Byrds)
All File Data 6	Tab Files for All Data 6	Tapioca Tundra (Monkees)	Winter's Song (Lindisfarne)
		Meet On The Ledge (Fairport Convention)	You Just May Be The One (Monkees)
		40,000 Headmen (Traffic)	Feel a Whole Lot Better (Byrds)
		39 (Queen)	Down South Jukin' (Lynyrd Skynyrd)
		Things Goin' On (Lynyrd Skynyrd)	Don't Look Now (Lynyrd Skynyrd)
		Four Until Late (Cream)	Lalena (Deep Purple)
		Old Cotton Fields Back home (CCR)
		The Thunder Rolls (Garth Brooks)	Whiskey Bottle (Bad Company)
		Movin' On (Bad Company)	Devil Baby (Knopfler)
		What It Is (Knopfler)	Prairie Wedding (Knopfler)
All File Data 7	Tab Files for All Data 7	Trawlerman's Song (Knopfler)	Our Shangrila (Knopfler)
		Uncle Pen (Buck Owens)	It Came Out Of The Sky (CCR)
		The End Of The Line (Travelling Willburys)	Workin' On The Railroad (Notting Hillbillies)
		The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (Alan Arkin, from the movie The Return Of Captain Invincible)	Remember (Free)
		Oh I Wept (Free)	Riding On A Pony (Free)
		It Never Rains In California (A Hammond)	Prairie Wedding (Knopfler)
		Love Will Find A Way (Paul Rodgers)	Judy In Disguise (J Fred & PB Band)
		Hickory Holler's Tramp (O.C.Smith)	Quality Shoes (Knopfler)

The use of John Foggerty material (Creedence Clearwater) reflects a bit of a change to accommodate my Banjo. Anyone who plays a 5-string will know what I mean. I was lucky enough to find a left-handed 5-string banjo (Ozark), and finally learned to play a stringed instrument the right way round... for the first time.

Having learned my first complex but nice sounding pick riff... 3251 4251... thanks to this brilliant little article for the help with this and the basic chords... and a few additional chords from a little book called Instant 5-String Banjo, I realise that there is still a long way to go. In some ways though the Banjo is more fun than the guitar. Banjo Chords

And here is a little jpg file of a blank banjo chord. Load it into your favourite drawing program and use the brush or pencil tools to insert your own marks, to indicate finger positions for your chords. Then simply copy and paste it to a blank page. Finally, use the Undo to remove the finger position marks you made, and then make the next chord shape in the same way and copy and paste it to the page.. Banjo Chord Blank Graphic to make your own

For those of you who are interested in Banjo playing but are left handed like me, here is a chord diagram anf the principal chords you will need to play most songs. Left Handed Banjo Chords

For oldies out there: To help with a joint problem, caused by old age probably, I recently found a supplier who got me a miniature Fender Squier. That is a real blessing and I heartily endorse the product. To all intents and purposes it is a Fender Strat, less a pickup volume control and treble. It plays easily and provided I stick to light 10 to 47 accoustic string sets, it gives a pleasing sound. I tried lighter strings but the tuning wanders... something to be aware of with miniatures. The guys who got it for me said at the time that these miniatures were always in short supply, so it's no surprise to see they don't currently list it.

There is a solution to the above problem of using light gauge strings and wandering tuning on a miniature model... tune it to G C F A# D G. Keeps just the right amount of tension on the strings. Of course it's no longer in Concert Pitch, and you need to adjust any material or backing tracks to suit.

A clear-out of an old song book prompted the latter files in Data 5 (Love Street etc.) and the files Data 6. Just some tracks I didn't want to lose. Some of them are not exactly easy tracks to play and nowhere near as easy as Foggerty material to perform either. In the main, the versions here are my own preferences with respect to arrangements and are naturally not as the originals were.

To Re-Set the QY100 to factory fresh... all stored data and settings cleared... do the following...equivalent to a CTRL ALT DEL on a computer... drops the system and dumps the memory...

Switch off the QY.

Hold down these three buttons on the far left...

WHILE HOLDING THESE BUTTONS DOWN... Switch on the QY

Now you have the factory re-set screen.

Ignore all other options and take F3 by pressing the third function key down on the right of the screen...

There is a really problematical situation with Smartmedia cards which QY100 users need to take into account. Smartmedia cards are practically out of date by modern standards, and stop at 128M really. Most card formats have largely been overtaken and superceded by Secure Digital now.

Whilst in some respects that helps QY users, as the price of Smartmedia cards can only drop now, it also poses a future problem over availability. In practical use I have found that the QY100 performs best with 32M Smartmedia Cards... balancing the space provided with reasonable access times. The access times increase a little for 64M cards, but can increase significantly for 128M.

The real problem occurs with Smartmedia Cards if you make the cardinal error of formatting your card on a PC or some other device... other than the QY.

As general rules:

I have recovered cards damaged in this way quickly by formatting them in an ancient Ricoh RDC5300 camera, and then in the QY again. However this process won't work for 128M cards as those are beyond the capacity of the Ricoh.

I even tried formatting the Smarmedia Cards in an older MP3 player which used them... but this wasn't any use at all.

There are lots of File Recovery Programs which also promise to recover files from Smartmedia. That might suggest to you that they may help with the format problem. None of those I have come across so far have done so.

There are some procedures detailed on-line for recovering Smartmedia Cards to use in Olympus Cameras, with a special additional feature involving panorama photographs. Whilst these may be effective in some cases, I have tried writing directly to a particularly stubborn 128M card in the way some of them advocate, to no avail so far.

Perhaps it would be advisable to limit the card capacity you use to 64 Meg and below. We did find a noticeable delay accessing the 128M cards on the QY. It is probable that the QY has to read the File Allocation Table in each time that it accesses a card. On a 32M card, and to a lesser extent a 64M card, the File Allocation Table sizes will be consequently much smaller than that of a 128M Card... thereby taking far less time to access.

Although unique, and very useful, and also a lot of fun, we cannot lose sight of the fact that technologically speaking the QY100 is years out of date. It's memory capacity is 512k... kilobytes mark you, not Megabytes. When you start to try out working with midi files in the QY you will swiftly experience the slowness inherent in the hardware and the limitations in the memory capacity.

Using the files created by the QY100 itself, really you are using files which are tiny in size (by today's standards), and consist of nothing more really than lists of instructions to the on-board sound processor chip. They do not contain any music. Midi files contain much more detailed lists of instructions than QY files and they are intended for use in a very much wider range of possible equipment. Midi files take considerably longer to load into the QY. Instead of the maximum 20 song files, which is a natural limit for QY100 users creating internal QY files, the practical limit for loading in midi files is around about three. After that you tend to get the "Out of Memory" error.

One way some dedicated midi user folks use to overcome the three track limit in the QY100 is to concatenate or join their midi tracks together and take advantage of the QY100 limit on a single song file capacity... 1000 bars.

18th Sepember 2009 (still in the leukaemia of the nu liebour government)

A couple of people have written recently to say that they are unable to acquire a QY100... time and tide... and of course entropy... mean that the device is getting more and more scarce. With that in mind, and with a view to a new project, I decided to expand the provision here.

The new project is really a development of the QY100... insofar as the QY presents the user with operational independence... no dependence on the usual... band members who can't be bothered... band members gone sick... band members who quit... and so on.

I therefore decided to create a one man band setup.

So what is needed?

Going back to first principals... a concert recital for example... what do we find?

The musician, a piece of music (usually in a book), and a music stand.

OK... lets look at the stand first.

What can we do to make a one man band with a stand?

Well beef it up for a start.

Enter an outift called Athletic, who make really beefed up music stands. Further, they make music stands with extensions.

To cut a long story short, I now have a music stand which accomodates... on the left, a mini-mixer desk... on the right, my guitar processor, underneath it, an echo unit, and above it pokes a boom mic stand. The really pivotal part however is a move away from the QY altogether and into a Tablet... a laptop with a pen. I still make the tracks with the QY, but now I record them as MP3 into the Tablet... and... and this is the really pivotal bit... I embed them into Powerpoint presentations of the guitar tab files that I use.

The Tablet therefore becomes the music book AND the backing track unit, all at once. I connect it to my ancient Peavey or Laney Amp by using a cheap Ground Loop Isolator cable, which removes the horrible noise you get from the connection between the Tablet and one of these old amps.

In addition to all this of course, the new powerpoint files are now accessible to all you folks who cannot get hold of a QY.

They are all RAR'd as one, two, or sometimes three individual files. The RAR files contain the Powerpoint TAB file, and the mp3 (if I decided to make one) of the backing track.

A QY100 issue which arises, now that internal batteries are beginning to fail, is that of battery replacement.

This is an easier task than may be initially supposed.

It is also at a very low cost to you, if you avoid the by-now mandatory eBay crooks who charged me more than £8 for a "specialised fit battery"; and a friend paid in excess of £5 for one single CR2032!!

The QY100 internal battery is a very common type. Listed almost universally as a CR2032 disc battery, it's use is found in many devices including watches, HP Jornada 720 hand held computers, Atari Portfolio Memory cards... also used in Roland Organs, and Psion Organiser II Memory Packs. It is also cheap to buy. I buy 4 x 5 battery cards of these batteries direct from Hong Kong mainly for use with my old hand held computers. Cost is around £5 (UK) inc. postage.

Six screws removed on the back of the QY100 give you access.

Turn the QY100 on it's face and gently lever open the casing. It should not take much effort. If it does then you may have inadvertantly left a screw in.

Undo two screws hoolding the copper shiedling in place and gently fold it back along the line of sockets to uncover the main board.

Watch out for the midi switch at the card reader end, as it tends to fall out and is easily lost.

The card reader mouth may also fall off... it is only a push fit, so replacement will not be a problem for you.

Push the battery back in the opposite direction to the card reader and you will find that it's edge nearest the card reader clicks out of the socket and you can remove the battery.

Replace the same way it came out, but make sure that you engage the battery in the socket as it was when you found it. ie. with a gap between the battery and the plastic socket on the side away from the card reader and with the battery secured by the wings of the socket nearest the card reader... as you see it here.

Now carefully unfold and replace the copper shield and fit the two securing screws.

Carefully replace the back of the QY100 on to the front assembly and re-fit the remaining six screws.

If you're confident that you have fitted everything back together properly, then it is time to connect to the PSU and switch on and see if the battery is working.

You will get probably a Factory Set message when you switch on. Press the Enter key to clear this.

Load in a set of songs or a single song if that is how you work.

Test it and then switch off.

Disconnect the PSU and wait for an hour or so.

Switch on again and you should find that same song still there just as you used to before the battery failed.

Line 6 Pocket Pod

Having used a Zoom PFX-9003 for quite some time now, and programmed what I felt to be the most useful sound models, I happened across the Line 6 range late last year.

I thought Zoom PFX9003 was about as good as guitar processors got, having also tried it's competition... the Korg Pandora range. And indeed it is very good at what it does, AS FAR AS IT GOES. But the Pod range is surely the next big thing.

Why?

Well, using the above named devices you are able to program sounds and models to suit your own efforts or input (and I only ever found one of these once) a documented program.

So take it to the next level, and with the Line 6 Pod range add USB connectivity, and downloaded software from the Line 6 site to manage the connection. Add in hundreds of user created guitar sound models, which are free to audition and download if you want them and you begin to appreciate the idea.

I always wanted to be able to play favourite songs, written and composed by Peter Green during his time with Fleetwood Mac. Compositions like the eternal instrumental Albatross, or seemingly impossible-to-play tracks like Green Manalishi, or the beautiful Man of the World, or... Oh Well... parts one and two.

You would not believe the trouble you'd need to go to in order to emulate the Peter Green sound found on all of these tracks. Most of the information is apochryphal, but it seems to boil down to something along the lines of taking out the pickups on an SG and inverting the magnets in them. Yeah right. But I don't like Gibsons. Especially after someone lent me an old Les Paul and I swear the principal component was a breeze block... it was so heavy.

Instead you only need to buy a Line 6 Pocket Pod, and simply download the sound file. After that, more or less any guitar that you plug in to the Pod then takes on a good deal of the Peter Green sound aspect. Same goes for Page, Knopfler, Kossof, and most of my other guitar heroes. It is absolutely gobsmacking, to sit there with this guitar that you've known and used for years... and suddenly it sounds disturbingly just like Peter Green's SG. It inspires you to persevere with the Tabs that you'd had, but left to one side all these years.

The buit-in effects, aside from the ones you can download are very cool too. Bit too much crunch for me, but you can build your own favourite list of sounds using the slots in the User area. I was so taken with the Pocket Pod that I went to the next-next level... Line 6 latest generation Pod... and purchased the new X3.

Aside from being a bigger pod than the Pocket, which runs on four AAs or a cheap 300ma multi-volt psu, the X3 also demands a power supply (which fortunately comes with it).

It is important to note at this point that Pocket Pod files are NOT interchangeable (as far as I know) with the X3, and vice versa. But they are all free to dload and use, so what the hell? There may be a way of conversion between formats but to be honest, since discovering the Peter Green effect, I have not pursued this yet.

Perhaps the single most significant point in the X3 is the ability to mix TWO guitar sound files together as one. That is another and still on-going story.

The Pocket Pod sells here for around £90 new, but as you'd expect there are used units for less on eBay. Its a hell of a way to use 4 AA batteries, but trust me, the resulting sounds are worth it.

Here's an early attempt at Green Manalishi, using the Peter Green Tone on the Pocket Pod, to give you some idea of the incredible tone. The guitar used is a Tanglewood Memphis Anniversary. The amp is a Laney GC80A with all settings returned to nominal... ie. no reverb or other effect in use.