Bear Tenderness: 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞 with Hubert Maël

If Post Office reactions are anything to go by, there is something 'edgy' about buying a CD in 2026. Not unusual, necessarily; people have been buying records, cassettes and CDs again for years, and physical media has a special significance now that it's not the default way of listening to music. Sometimes, though, you buy a CD because it is the only practical way you can hear something at all.

That was the situation I found myself in with Tendresses d’ours, an album by French musician Hubert Maël, released on CD in 1997. The strange thing is that I hadn't been searching for his music. I had been researching the Yamaha QY700.

The QY700 was Yamaha’s flagship music production workstation of the mid-1990s, combining a substantial sequencer with a sound generator, mixer and workstation-style interface. It came from a period in which a single piece of hardware could form the centre of an entire home studio, allowing a musician to compose, arrange, select sounds, program drums and save work without needing a computer. Today, the device is interesting because it represents a workflow that very nearly disappeared, but at the time was simply the latest in a long line of technological advancements from a major musical instrument company.

Image: Yamaha QY700 promotional advertisement (1996)

That distinction has become kind of amusing in recent years. Next to modern all-in-one workstations like the Akai MPC X, which arrived in 2017, the QY700 is experiencing something of a renaissance among musicians looking to escape the computer-based workflows that dominate music making today. There is something charmingly circular about this: a machine now regarded as a counter-cultural alternative to the modern digital audio workstation was itself, in its day, an extremely modern integrated digital production environment.

While exploring QY700 material on YouTube, I came across a comment from someone who claimed to have made an entire jazz album using one. The comment linked to 5 tracks on a SoundCloud page, where the artist identified himself as Hubert Maël. According to the comment, the compositions had been fully arranged on the QY700, with vocals and guitar recorded afterwards.

Audio: Original songs by Hubert Mael. Extrait de l'album "Tendresse d'Ours" (1997)

That description alone was intriguing, but listening to the album excerpts piqued my interest even more. Unlike the bulk of QY700 content online, this wasn’t a collection of electronic experiments inspired by the dominant genres of its era. Tendresses d’ours is relaxed, traditionally oriented jazz that happens to have a machine providing the instrumental foundation. The sounds are unmistakably 90s, but the compositions don't attempt to draw attention to – or away from – that fact. It appeared that the QY700 was simply the tool of choice, by which Hubert had crafted a solid jazz project – something that other commenters also found remarkable.

The problem was that, having learned about the CD, I couldn’t actually find a copy.

Then after two years of occasionally searching, two results appeared: one through a French marketplace that wouldn’t ship to Australia, and another on eBay in the United Kingdom. I bought the latter, and the CD eventually travelled halfway around the world before I had heard the album in full.

Image: Hubert Maël - Tendresses d'ours album cover (photo by Denis Pourcher, 1997)

That experience felt strangely familiar. For decades, the thrill of the chase has been one of the joys of record collecting: finding out that something exists, tracking down a copy and eventually getting to play it. But this time the object was a CD, a format that was originally supposed to make recorded music more durable and accessible.

Almost thirty years later, however, CDs have begun to develop some of the same archival characteristics acquired by vinyl when the industry moved on. Like records, CDs can physically exist somewhere while becoming increasingly disconnected from the way most people discover music. If records are not reissued or digitised, they can become difficult to hear regardless of how well the original has survived. The fact that CDs were marketed as superior to records has not spared them from a similar fate.

Image: US CD shipment trends, 1996–2026

This brings us back to Tendresses d’ours, which isn’t a 'lost' album in the dramatic sense. It hasn’t vanished, and its creator hasn’t disappeared. What has disappeared, at least to a large extent, is the infrastructure that made encountering the album more possible. A CD released in 1997 could once have been sitting in a shop, a library, a radio station or a friend’s car. Today, unless someone happens to know that it exists, it is very easy for the release to remain effectively invisible.

The same process is already happening with digital music, although it is harder to see. There is an enormous amount of music from the early years of digital distribution that never made the transition from portable hard drives, MiniDiscs, and early online services – the ancient Australian website mp3.com.au springs to mind – across to the streaming domain. Digital files may be easier to reproduce than records, but that doesn’t mean they are automatically preserved.

Image: Hubert Maël - Tendresses d'ours album rear panel (photo by Denis Pourcher, 1997)

In that sense, the story of Tendresses d’ours is part of a much longer history of recorded music being left behind by the technologies that once carried it. The interesting thing is that the route back to this particular album was itself entirely accidental. Decades after releasing the CD, Hubert left a message for a new generation of people discovering the QY700. The comment was a tiny act of preservation, but without it the connection between the hardware and the album might have remained buried.

Recently, I was fortunate to connect with Hubert directly. He was not only happy to talk about the album, but also supplied photos of French press coverage from when it was released, providing a glimpse of the world in which Tendresses d’ours actually appeared. Those articles describe him as a songwriter with a particular affection for jazz-bossa, and they all mention the contrast between his imposing physique and the tenderness of his songs. One profile describes him as a “tender bear”, a play on the 'ours' of Tendresses d’ours.

Image: Local media articles, supplied by Hubert Maël (1998)

The articles are revealing for another reason: there is no critique of Hubert's invisible bandmate – the QY700 so central to his project. Given what is said about its steep learning curve and deep, menu-based workflow, this album seems (at least to contemporary observers) to be one of those technical feats that, like the instrument itself, have become more noteworthy over time. Perhaps that's why even he finds it funny that despite the publicity about his songs, his voice, his guitar and his character, nearly thirty years later, the machine is the reason his CD was rediscovered.

There is a temptation to think of music history as a continuous record, but it isn’t. It is a vast collection of fragments, some preserved because institutions decided they were important and others surviving because somebody simply cared enough to keep them. Someone keeps the records, copies the tapes, holds on to the masters, or leaves a breadcrumb about how the music was made. In that sense, Hubert Maël’s story is as interviste as they come.

Image: Hubert performing (1998)

You made Tendresses d’ours in 1997, entirely using a Yamaha QY700 apart from the vocals and guitar. How did you first come to the QY700, and what made you choose it as the basis for an entire album?

First of all, I’m not a professional. I’m just an amateur who has loved music since I was born.

Around 1996 I was playing guitar, but I didn’t know any musicians I could play with. So I composed a few songs on guitar and wanted to make some demos. I bought a small Roland sequencer – I can’t remember the model anymore – along with a four-track cassette recorder and a microphone. But I found the sounds were really poor.

I read an article about the QY700 and understood that I would have everything I needed with it, including sounds “like a DX7”, which for me was the absolute peak.

I was a long way from the idea of making a record. The idea grew as I kept composing.


What did your composing process look like? Were the pieces written away from the machine and then programmed into the QY700, or did the music develop directly inside the sequencer?

I composed on guitar using chords whose names I didn’t even know at the time. I was trying to get close to what I was hearing in my head.

At first I used the patterns in the machine – drums, chords and bass. I think I made almost all of the songs that way. Then, as I learned the machine, I started rebuilding parts of them. I completely remade the songs at least three times!

The last time, I ended up programming every event by hand on the machine: every little event for every instrument, the sound, volume, panning, the length of every note, etc., etc. Absolutely everything was programmed element by element. I did this at night while my family was sleeping, and in the morning I went to work. I was really crazy!

Once I had made my demos, I went to a recording studio. They liked the songs and thought it was funny to work on backing tracks that were entirely MIDI. They had never done that before, especially not for songs that were jazzy as well!

Image: Yamaha QY700 promotional advertisement (1996)

The album is quite different from what many people might expect from a QY700 project. What were your musical influences at the time, and what kind of record were you trying to make?

I like jazz, and I had this cool and jazzy feeling in my head – I still have it! And I also like doing the opposite of what people expect.

Making “jazz” from start to finish with a MIDI machine taught me a lot about how to make instruments sound convincing.

But it didn’t help my relationships with musicians. For example, there was a guy who presented a jazz program on television. Somebody must have given him a CD, because he called me and said he liked it. I explained that it had been made without musicians, using a machine…

He never called me back. 😅


How were the vocals and guitar recorded over the QY700 sequences? What was the rest of the recording setup?

I arrived at the studio with my QY700 and we ran the tracks one by one onto a 16-track recorder – analogue, of course! They were treated as if they had come from real instruments: EQ, compression, and so on.

A few of the pad sounds were doubled in MIDI using a small expander from the period. Then I recorded the vocals and guitars over the top.

Everything had been prepared in my garage. The whole thing was finished in two and a half days.

**Scan of disk itself**


What was the original release of Tendresses d’ours like? How many copies were made, and how was the CD distributed?

The CD was a co-production with the recording studio. I think only 300 CDs were pressed. I still have about fifty left! 

No record company wanted it. That said, I was a terrible salesman. I didn’t push very hard.


Did you perform this material live, or was the album primarily intended as a recording?

As I said, I knew nothing about the music business, and finding concerts was a mystery to me. Eventually I found some musicians and did two or three concerts…

There was nobody there.

And of course the musicians left me. I was very disappointed because by then I had started to believe that I had some talent. 😉

Image: “...It doesn't take long to appreciate the size of the heart beating behind this guitar and in every fibre of these vocal chords...” (La Montagne, 1998)

What happened to the QY700 after you finished the album? Do you still have the original machine, sequences or any of the project files?

The QY700 was murdered by a glass of Coca-Cola a few months later.

RIP.


In 2018 you left a comment on a YouTube video about the QY700, decades after making the album, and linked to some of the tracks on SoundCloud. What prompted you to do that?

Pure nostalgia! I was delighted to find again the companion of my nights back then.


How does it feel to have the album rediscovered almost thirty years later through an interest in the QY700 itself?

I was very surprised that someone would talk to me about this old thing, for which I still have a great affection. For the songs, but also for the machine, which really was extraordinary.

The [Yamaha] engineers had a stroke of genius. And yet the QY700 never had the success it deserved. Perhaps people weren’t ready for it.

When I see everything we can do today with technology, and yet there is so little invention and creativity, it makes me want to play…

Only guitar!

Finally, when you listen back to Tendresses d’ours now, what do you hear? Does it still feel like the record you wanted to make in 1997, or do you hear it differently with the distance of time?

The sounds have aged, the dynamics seem rather soft, there is too much reverb – I loved it in that studio! And there are mistakes I wouldn’t make today. But creatively, some of the songs still hold up.

Whether it’s made with a QY700 from the 1990s or with AI today, a good song is a melody, some chords and something in your guts.

That’s all. And that will never grow old.

Limited copies of Hubert's Tendresses d’ours original CD are available from our online store.

 

Words and research by Benny Badge.

Q&A translated from French to English, with the original meaning and character of the responses preserved.