Yamaha SEQTRAK Review & 5 Things To Know Before You Buy

In his latest loopop video, host Ziv Eliraz takes an in-depth look at the new Yamaha SEQTRAK, a portable groovebox, synthesizer and sequencer introduced at the 2024 NAMM Show.

The SEQTRAK is an all-in-one music creation station, designed for composing and performing electronic music anywhere. It’s sure to draw comparisons with the Teenage Engineering OP-1, because of its size and form factor.

But the SEQTRAK builds on Yamaha’s strengths, featuring an AWM2 sound engine with 128-note polyphony, in addition to a four-operator FM sound engine. And unlike the OP-1, the SEQTRAK is priced at a relatively affordable $399 USD.

Check out the video, and share your thoughts on the Yamaha SEQTRAK in the comments!

Topics covered:

TIMELINE:
0:00 Intro
1:05 Overview
2:40 Get a grip
3:15 Cheat sheet
3:30 USB MIDI
4:00 Velocity
4:55 Chrom drums
5:30 Mono sequencers!
6:20 MIDI CCs
6:45 Dongle anxiety
7:10 Bluetooth MIDI
7:25 MIDI settings
7:45 Be in GUI mode
8:40 GUI lock
9:00 Change defaults
9:15 Synth step seq
10:10 Advanced FX
12:10 Unlock 6 patterns
12:35 Temp save!
13:30 Fast params
13:45 App only stuff
14:00 FX 1 & 2
14:30 Trigger type
15:05 FX params
15:25 Synth LFO
16:15 7 sample tracks
16:55 FX strip secrets
19:20 Chord tips
20:30 Chord banks
21:00 Use the arp!
21:20 A faster Play
21:30 Fave shortcuts
23:30 Visualizer blues
23:55 Pros & cons
27:55 Outro

50 thoughts on “Yamaha SEQTRAK Review & 5 Things To Know Before You Buy

    1. A lot of innocent people die in Gaza and it’s indeed very painful and yet it is not considered as genocide by international law

        1. He did post about the hostage situation and something related to the red cross not able to enter to gaza, looppop is an israeli so he kind of has a stake in this, but he never “pushed for the Gaza invasion”, this is a total lie

    2. And I would like to see you understand the difference between a genocide and a necessary military response to a cruel terrorist massacre and stop spreading antisemitic propaganda online, but I guess we can’t all get what we want.

      1. Ziv Eliraz (Loopop), is Jewish and resides in Israel. I think most can certainly understand his reasoning for feeling as he does, however two things can be simultaneously true and appalling. The attacks of October 7th were ghastly and should be met with equal justice. And the occupation of nearly 5 million people, however corrupt and sinister their leadership may be, is also ghastly and an injustice that the Israeli people should understand!

        I lived and worked in Israel many years ago, and whilst not all Israeli’s agree with the occupation, and Hamas is not truly interested in peace and cohabitation, and since Israel is the lone adult in the room, they should act accordingly. Give the Palestinians their due justice and their the right to self determination. And then if such an attack ever occurs again, that would be a very different matter entirely; where Israel would have every justification.

        However the default verbal assault cannot be claims of antisemitism when one simply disagrees with Israel or Ziv on this matter. This sort of victimhood engenders greater division than understanding.

      2. Alecander you are trying to defend something that can not be defebnded! Hamas attacks were terrible but most of the Israelis that died were soldiers fighting Hamas and the soldiers were supposed to be well equipped trained prepared for and knew the risks. Innocent palestinians were not prepared for being bombarded on an industrial scale. Israel have killed far more innocent civilians than Russia have in Ukraine!!! In a far shorter yime!

          1. What are you talking about! Speaking up against horrible war crimes commited by Israel and by its insane leader Netanyahu is not antisemitic. It is anti war and anti corrupt leaders! And of course the same goes for Hamas!

            1. Your claims that the October 7 attack was primarily a battle between military forces is patently false, misleading, disinformation, and biased. And that is putting it mildly.

              We can all agree to an extent that Israeli response has been perhaps disproportionate, however what you wrote is misinformation, period!

              1. None of what I wrote was misleading false biased or disinformation. It is you who is misleading. I never said that oct 7 attack primarily was a battle between military forces. But in some ways it was. Israel has one of the best armies and intelligence organisations in the world and tfisands of spies in Gaza so very unlikely that they did not know that an armed uprising was coming. Now they are using the attack as an alibi for massmurdering Palestinians.
                You calling Israels response “somewhat” disproportionate is like a really sick joke!

                1. Again, you are literally contradicting yourself. This is from your own written words above “Hamas attacks were terrible but most of the Israelis that died were soldiers fighting Hamas and the soldiers were supposed to be well equipped trained prepared for and knew the risks” which explicitly claiming that most of the Israeli casualties of the October attacks was military losses. That is factually inaccurate.

                  And I never used the word “somewhat” as you clearly cannot retain what you have just read. I posited that indeed we can all agree that the response is “perhaps” disproportionate, however I now understand that facts have little place for you to arrive at a reasonable conclusion.

                  1. “Perhaps disproportionate” is not the words to use for the Israeli large scale attacks against mostly innocent civilians. They are disproportionate PERIOD!
                    As for how many of the killed in the 7 october attack that were military is not 100% clear neither is how many of the killed that got killed by israeli “friendly” fire..

                    1. You have an agenda, that much is clear.

                      War is rarely ever the answer to a conflict, however there is culpability on both sides. The irony of course is that your brand of “truth” is closer to Netanyahu’s perverse ideology and misdirection than you realise.

                      Whilst I believe civil and vigorous debate of ideas and viewpoints as a worthy undertaking, I will yield to Synthhead’s generous patience and latitude to allow this discourse to continue thus far and hence I have no more to say on the matter.

                      I hope that in time, after all the conflicts and grievances, we recognise that we are of one single race, human. Nothing is ours except our conduct and our true wealth, an allegiance to truth and justice for all.

                    2. Everyone has an agenda! Mine is that Israel should not be allowed to commit grave warcrimes against their mostly defenseless neighbours, nor should they be supported with money and weapons..
                      I blame Nethayahu the most for these atrocities but everybody that is turning a blind eye to Israels warcrimes should wake up and prostest!

              1. I am not naive just the opposite! The naive people in this are the ones that believes that Israels intelligence services and military did not know at least something about the attack beforehand. And speaking about terrorists hiding among civilians. Israel has plenty of such some are called violent settlers and some are undercover agents. Hamas terrorists should be damned but so should the bad people on the other side too!

      3. And yet, when you wrote this comment, there had been a UN preliminary rulling about this, finding that there are legitimate concerns about the Israel state commiting genoside…Sad!

  1. Powerful little beast, innit? I think they miniaturized it too much by 1/3 or even 1/2. It feels too fidgety to me, but I know a lot of people are freaking over it. If you’re willing to feed it with the app, I agree that the price is fair. The buttons and non-standard jacks all around the edges seem like a real PITA, but I can’t argue with the nice demo. Not for me, but definitely worthy.

      1. Side buttons are a terrible design choice, you need 2 hands to operate a side button, one to press the button and the other to hold the unit or it slides….this is not an issue with top buttons which is why everyone uses them!

        1. That’s only an issue if you poke that thing like a monkey would do. Most people have more than one finger on one hand. Like use your index finger to press the button while using your thumb to hold the unit in place. Maybe someone should make a tutorial video.

    1. It’s always OK to discuss THINGS and even to criticize THINGS on Synthtopia, including “shite geopolitical comments”.

      If we see comments cross the line into criticizing people, personal attacks or hate speech, they will be deleted.

      We do not pre-screen every comment, and this is the Internet, so we can’t guarantee that you won’t see a comment that you may find offensive.

      1. I read Synthtopia partly as an escape from the real world. It’s interesting to read about clever new tech like this, along with daft megasynths I will never be able to afford. I appreciate the effort you put in to keep the site spam free and am aware it’s an ongoing struggle.

        That said, I absolutely do not want to read irrelevant threads about war or politics on Synthtopia. It already gets rammed into our eyeballs on every single news site in the world, 24 hours a day.

        1. There’s much better places to hang out if you want and escape from the real world. This is an anonymous comment section. We are nothing but humans reduced to our opinions here. And gear reviewers are simply a subject among subjects. It’s not just Loopop and the Israel issue. Nothing exists in a vaccuum. Same with SOMA when the Ukraine invasion was impossible to ignore. This will always be part of online discourse, it happened many times before and it will happen countless time again. Scroll past the stuff you don’t want to read. It’s really simple (same reason I don’t bother clicking on anything Behringer or Teenage Engineering related, as the comments are predictable and I choose to ignore it as to prevent myself from wasting my time reading the same things again and again…)

    2. You can’t really silence stupidity but if you get emotional from reading comments (many people ignore it and focus on the subject) maybe the change should come from you

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