That's a weird take. I mean "Operator synthesis makes no logical sense"? He writes like FM went away.
While DX7 itself was eventually retired (and synths like M1 became popular), Yamaha made several further flagship FM synths, and FM synthesis is still widely popular, used in both plugin form (including several DX7 emulations plus lots of fresh FM implementations), modern dedicated FM synths (e.g. Korg Opsix, Elektron Digitone), and of course as FM sound engines in multi-engine synths (FM-X in Yamaha's keyboards like Montage and MODX, Hydrasynth's FM mode, Nord's FM engine, to name but a few). There are even boutique options (ReFace DX, Volca FM).
And of course even vintage DX7s go for a quite high price in second+ hand market...
Really people gave up on the DX7 because of the limited interface, somehow FM got the blame. A subtractive synth with a knob for each function is a fantastically intuitive thing, but when it's three buttons and a line of abbrv txt it's not very nice either.
I can model subtractive and additive patches quite accurately in my head. That's not a brag, it's just not very difficult if you understand the basic principles and you've put in a bit of practice. FM still takes me by surprise after decades of trying to master it.
As the article mentions, the UI of the DX7 made programming it, modifying existing sounds or coming up with new ones entirely, difficult to say the least.
With the Opsix, much of the ability to tweak aspects of the operators, envelopes, LFOs and so on, are given dedicated knobs and sliders, or easily accessible menus whose parameters are tweakable with physical knobs. The hands-on UI of the Opsix turns what once was an ordeal of menu diving and incremental buttons into a much more rewarding, interactive experience.
I play one live in a band and use an old Yamaha KX76, the dedicated controller bigger brother to the DX7 as a controller for the Opsix. Best of both worlds. The feel on those old keyboards is superb.
It's in the tone.
Acoustic instruments respond in a complex way to the variation in strength of input: when you strike the key in the piano faster, pluck a string harder, or blow air info the saxophone stronger, you don't merely get a louder sound: the harmonic content, the timbre of the sound changes as well.
Analogue synthesis struggled accomplishing this. The classic analog synth would have an envelope generator ("ADSR") controlling the loudness of the tone, and another, most commonly, controlling the filter (the thing that makes the synth do a wowowow sound on the same note), but responsive fading and evolution of the harmonics wasn't readily available.
On the Yamaha DX7, it was built into the core idea of FM synthesis.
You don't know it when you hear it, you know it when you play it: the way the keyboard responded to the touch was alive, magical.
You didn't need to rely on the modulation wheels and joysticks and knobs to vary the timbre as you play. You could simply play the keyboard.
On my Yamaha Reface DX (which overcomes the drawbacks of FM user interface), I can easily make a tone whose character (not loudness! - or not just loudness) changes when I simply play harder. It's like having several instruments at once at your disposal, blending between them on the fly.
It's that playability that makes FM make sense — and it was what other digital synthesis technologies went for, too. Roland's "linear arithmetic", vector synthesis, and M1's multisampling all explored that area — but they came after DX7.
What makes FM synthesis unique is the heavily non-linear response of the tone to the dynamics. At worst, it's unpredictable, but once you figure out where the sweet spots are in the parameter space, you get a tone like nothing else. A bell that's also a string orchestra. A guitar with a soul of the saxophone, but not mistaken for either; an identity all of its own.
Yamaha DX7 heavily leaned into this aspect in instrument's design, via providing additional parameters that controlled the sensitivity of operators to velocity depending on where on the keyboard you are, so that the lower tones would have a different character from higher ones.
The "diminished brilliance" the author writes about was likely that — i.e., the author not figuring out how FM sound design works, which they openly admitted. It was matter of taste of whoever made the presets; without programming those curves in, the higher notes can easily sound screeching.
The point, again, was that the instrument wasn't merely responsive in a way that analogue synths couldn't dream of, but that the way in which it was responsive, tone-wise, was programmable, and varied not just from patch to patch, but across the scale and velocity range.
Again, think about how plucking different strings on a guitar harder produces a different variation in tonal response. Each string has its own character.
This is the soul of the mathematical idea of FM synthesis: that the tone evolution should not merely be controlled by time passing (as it is on most analogue synths, via envelope generators and LFO's), and not by knob twiddling (modulation wheels, knobs, sliders, joysticks,...) — but by playing the instrument itself.
And on a keyboard, what you really play with is where on the keyboard you strike a key, and how fast.
Yamaha DX7 allowed the player to vary the timbre by playing the instrument, with both hands, by having all tone generators depend on these two variables in a programmable, non-linear, interesting way.
FM synthesis of Yamaha DX7 therefore can't be separated from the physical keyboard it shipped with. The way the tones felt as you played them were determined by the response curves which simply don't map in the same way to a different keyboard.
The fact that the DX7 was a digital synth obscured the fact that it was a very analog instrument in that way; that to get a truly good FM preset, you need to tune it to the keyboard response (i.e. velocity curves), and that involves the analog components.
It's also for this reason that DX7 only has membrane buttons, and no knobs or sliders. It didn't need them. The 60 keys were your knobs and sliders, the means to control the tone.
That's why the ePiano on the DX-7 was on 60% of the new releases. It didn't merely emulate the Rhodes (which, by all means, wasn't a rare instrument).
What it did was it gave keyboard players a way to play with the tone of their instrument while playing the instrument, something the Rhodes would have a more limited range for, as the variation in tone response was constrained by how similar the actual metallic forks that made the sound were to each other, and how similar the hammers are across the octaves — and the digital DX7 didn't have that limitation.
It also gave the people used to playing the synth with one hand (to be able to tweak the sound with the other) the freedom to play truly polyphonically, and use the keyboard itself to control the tone dynamics.
Playing it was a liberating experience, and it still is, because while intricate multi-sampling can also give you that effect (at no less difficulty, mind you, even if you have the samples!), FM does it differently.
The musicians didn't need to be mindful of all that; the absolute majority (Brian Eno expected) were outright oblivious to why and what made DX7 the instrument that you had to have.
You just felt it.
And yes, new FM synthesizers keep coming. Because emulating acoustic instruments is not just easy with sampling these days, it also isn't enough. You can just hire someone to play the real instrument, after all.
You need a bit more than that to craft a distinctive sound — especially a new one.
Liven XFM, Korg Opsix, Arturia Minifreak all go boldly where manmade sound didn't go before, and these are just three novel FM synthesizers from this decade.
Reface DX came out less than 10 years ago; and its FM engine is different from DX7 (as is the UX — you can finally change the tone while playing it with live controls).
And for all the talk of how FM is old, I've yet to see someone not be captivated by the ePiano patch that comes stock on the Reface DX when I let them play it when I bring the instrument around with me on trips (which I often do).
Current developments in the controllers (like what ROLI is doing) will allow all the existing sound generation techniques to shine in new ways, including FM.
But I think it's the physical package of the keyboard, the algorithm, and the presets tuned to the combination of the two is what made the DX7 such a success.
A new FM instrument could easily be a hit with these factors, particularly if they don't skimp on including built-in speakers and making the presets sound great on them. FM truly shines when all the pieces are aligned in a performer's instrument.
Reface DX comes close to that point, but the presets it ships with are more of an engine demo than sounds to make music with, the speakers are not loud, and the mini-keys (which I love!) were a turn-off for many people — because in the Internet age, people would judge a machine without actually playing it, and that's the only way to understand what's so damn special about FM synthesis.
It's the way you feel when you play it.
A sound demo simply won't get that across.
Well, let's be clear: the speakers are just for noodling.
Nobody who performs would use the built-in speakers of such a keyboard, not even street performers.
- the only exception is the big-ass speakers in digital home pianos, and still those are only for home use.
Just for noodling. And trying it in a store. And playing with friends (you don't need much to play along an acoustic guitar). Or playing and singing in a room, or next to a campfire.
All of these applications don't require big cabinets; beefing up the speakers to 5W (and adding a bit more bass response) would do a lot for the reface DX.
>Nobody who performs would use the built-in speakers of such a keyboard, not even street performers.
Well, that's exactly my point (though I've yet to see a street performer with a Reface DX, other than myself, that is).
The portable amps I do use with the DX can be easily built into the body (I have the keytar strap, and even duck taping a micro amp to the keyboard gives enough firepower for street performances).
The built-in speakers on 1980s keyboards were much louder.
>- the only exception is the big-ass speakers in digital home pianos, and still those are only for home use.
This is not quite true.
Check out the small amps coming out these days, that make Roland Cube Street look huge in comparison.
Blackstar Fly is a respectable example; there are many others.
There is no good reason why something like that can't come built into the keyboard.
Who plays an FM synth on a campfire? Not even Kraftwerk! And I don't think it's for jamming with friends with acoustic guitars either. It's more for electronic musicians and keyboardists wanting something portable to noodle at home, or indie musicians for when playing live.
I bring it camping all the time.
Reface DX owners, mostly, because that's the only modern FM synth with speakers.
I usually use the ePiano patch, which I modify to sound louder; it blends perfectly with the guitar.
>And I don't think it's for jamming with friends with acoustic guitars either
Then you think incorrectly. It's a very versatile instrument, which is for anything that people use it for.
Pigeonholing it as either a home studio or stage instrument is precisely what makes Reface DX such an underrated instrument.
I wouldn't romanticize it as anything other than cost-cutting, later flagship models got sliders.
A classic analog synth wouldn't sell with such controls.
I'm in love with my Reface DX, and have a soft spot for all FM synth. I'm glad it came through!
The DX7 is a musical instrument in its own right. Samplers are emulators of something else.
Nobody said samplers are confined to playing emulations of acoustic instruments. There are tons of creative users to make patches, and after the initial sample is added (which could be anything), most samplers have a full blown set of filtering, envelope, modulation, fx, audio manipulation etc options.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWcEruvc9eA&t=72s https://soundmondo.yamahasynth.com/user/7744
There are some patch editors and librarians to help you: https://ctrlr.martintarenskeen.nl/
You might have had a defective one.
I played mine in every possible setting (walking the streets, in the forest, on a mountain top, in the desert, indoors, outdoors, at night, during the day, etc), and never had that issue. (FWIW I applied all firmware updates when they came out).
I did have other issues though:
— once in a blue moon, it'd factory reset itself on startup while running on batteries (a gentle reminder to back up your patches). I didn't have that issue after switching to powering off a power bank with a USB-to-12v adapter (with USB-C supporting 12V natively, that's just a cable).
— sometimes, F and Bflat would stop responding in all octaves. A gentle whack would fix that. Taking it apart and making sure all the connections are tight seems to have fixed it for good.
What I'm getting at is that there absolutely were some QC issues with an otherwise nearly indestructible instrument (between all the drops and two Burning Man trips, boy did that thing take a beating).
Might be worth giving it another go if that's the only problem.
https://www.planetanalog.com/force-sensing-eliminates-false-.... (See the bit on the VCNL3030X01 sensor in the middle. I tried to text fragment link, but HN seems to strip that off)
Think of a patch as a vector in the parameter space. For analogue (subtractive/linear model) synthesisers almost all of the space makes some kind of sense. You get a usable sound even if it's weird. With FM (non-linear) synthesis a lot of the parameter space is completely unusable and the great sounds are clustered in little islands around which tiny changes in any parameters has wild effects - especially for patches that use a feedback operator with high settings.
A good DX patch is a finely balanced creation. IIRC the sample rate is 60KHz and the oscillator control resolution is 14 bits, That doesn't give you as much control as with digital virtual synths today. Setting up fine control of key-tracking and velocity is absolutely essential to making the DX preformative.
Now one of the lovely things is how you can download literally tens of thousands of DX7 patches, all the Yamaha cartridges and compilations of peoples personal patch collections from the past 40 years. But because of the extreme sensitivity of the programming not all of them work perfectly with the various emulator plugins and so they need manual tweaking.
If you play these patches on the DX7 itself, how good is the reproducibility? I would assume the digital settings to match perfectly. Is there anything else going on that might make patches feel different on different DX7s?
For example, I could imagine some oscillators having subtle differences, perhaps with variation with temperature? If the signal path is all downstream of the same clock, at least until the final analog conversion, I’d expect negligible variation.
About variance; I'm talking about the design of emulators. There's quite a lot of VSTs and other plugins (that all sound amazing) but the same patch doesn't necessarily sound identical on each. Two classic voices to test from the original ROM presets are Tuberise and GrandPNO2.
BTW these are digital oscillators so temperatures and component tolerances are not a factor.
Just last month I got a cheap RF doorbell chime for $3 from AliExpress with a dozen different selectable tones and they all have that distinctive FM sound. I was a little surprised that even today FM synthesis remains a cheaper way to generate complex tones than sampled waveforms. The article didn't even explore the fascinating development of FM synthesis which made an unlikely leap from esoteric academic research at Stanford to an incredibly successful product that had global pop culture impact. https://usa.yamaha.com/products/contents/music_production/sy...
It's a 40 years old digital synth (so trivial to replicate one to one), with no special hands on controls as a keyboard, and one with 150,000+ units sold, with about a dozen modern replications.
$400 would already be an impressive sum for such constraints.
But it regularly goes for 800+ in Reverb.com for example.
Good luck finding a 60-key MIDI controller with velocity-sensitivity and aftertouch for less than $200, and it's without getting into replication (of either the controller or the synth).
Everytime I read about some cool old synth, I check how much they cost and they are always hundreds or thousands of dollars, I think DX7s are like $500+.
They were so commonplace people were donating theirs to NIN so he could smash them during the show. It was a whole thing.
I don’t think it really moved the needle on the number out there, but it does show how ubiquitous they were.
They were, for a long time, but the figure I've seen is something like 100k for the original model. The market is so much bigger now I don't really believe it's true anymore.
True, but everyone seems to want $500 for barely working ones and significantly more for decent ones.
Of course you can get romplers and keyboards with preprogrammed sounds much cheaper. And you can probably do something quite nice with a Behringer JT-4000M (once it hits the shops) and a cheap MIDI keyboard.
For monophonic new you have options like the
Korg Minilogue Behringer MS-1 IK Multimedia UNO Synth Pro Novation Bass Station II Yamaha Reface series
It’s probably one of the most popular things to do in the music scene.
It's also a pretty substantial object. They have a metal case! It's quite a large and heavy thing to ship and store.
No, it's just that the supply of old synths in general appears to exceed the demand, but because there is this idea that old synths are valuable, people are willing to sit on them with high listing prices instead of adjusting their prices to move them. It's not really an efficient market and it's frustrating.
Uh, yeah, that is quite a take. Like most synths, the DX7 went through an untrendy era, but it’s certainly bounced back and you’ll hear its patches used all over the place today. That Top Gun tubular bell patch, for example, shows up quite a bit - most recently heard it on a track called 4AM (the Fauns Remix) by Power Glove.
Not to mention there are a ton of software emulations, including the free Dexed. There are literally thousands of DX7 patches available online, and what’s great about Dexed is it makes it easy to transfer them to a real DX7 using MIDI sysex.
What’s also great about Dexed is that it makes programming the DX7 a lot easier, especially if you have the first revision, like me, with the membrane buttons that look cool in all their multicoloured glory but are complete ass to use.
I get the sense there’s a really thriving community around this excellent and highly influential synth.
And that’s not even going in to all the excellent new FM synths that you’ve talked about, which trace their heritage back to the DX7.
Not specific to DX7, but its OPL cousins are also highly regarded and extensively researched in game emulation community.
Yeah, but what a computer it was!
Sampling, waveform editing, sequencing. Incredible in the early 80s when it came onto the scene. But, of course, it was wildly expensive, and even by the late 80s its capabilities were being eroded by equipment that mere mortals could actually hope to afford, including home computers like the Atari (MIDI + sequencing) and Amiga (sampling + sequencing), along with the nascent audio scene on PCs and Macs.
Surprisingly, Fairlight still (sort of) exist although I have to squint pretty hard to see them as exactly the same company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairlight_(company).
I bought a vintage Yamaha TX81z (they're cheap on ebay) and while it features a tiny LCD UI it also comes with a very logical diagram printed on the top of the case. Yamaha's user manuals are also well written.
I've enjoyed making dozens of FM synth patches on all sorts of instruments (perhaps because I am attracted to the FM sounds that you still hear all the time in pop and dance music.) At the end of the day most synthesis methods boil down to two knobs: signal amplitude and spectral complexity, and FM isn't that different, especially with a single oscillator/operator pair.
Just as a visualization for the parameters that DX7 hides from its users behind that interface, Matrixsynth made thebDT7 which puts all parameters on knobs and it looks like this: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj...
I’ve seen piano patches that sound REALISTIC because in 8 layers, you can model the hammer, the initial string hit, the cabinet echo, string resonance, and a whole lot of other timbres… but it takes SO MUCH EFFORT. So unless you’re a /real/ sound designer or you buy patches online, you’re better off getting a Digitone for “simpler” FM or just stick to the MODX’s excellent sampled acoustic instruments.
Yeah… the MODX/Montage UI is really bad and feels like something out of 2004.
What I'd be interested in is how viable it is for producing intetesting, distinctive sounds, and tweaking them to your liking in a comprehensible way, not poking blindly.
pianos are enjoyable, but expensive and very heavy
VS plug a headset in and stop being interrupted by irate neighbours annoyed by your enthusiastic musical expression, while still enjoying "real piano" dynamics.
(or waking the kid that you just put to bed in the adjacent room and finally it's that me-time of the day)
Because via modelling (not necessarily FM-based) they can be made more realistic or more expressive than pre-recorded samples (see Pianotte or SWAM for examples).
Also you can then make the piano tonal characteristics as you want them (instead of confined to a fixed real piano's sound).
… but if you’re into modelling… man, I’m hankering for an Erica Synth Steampipe! Just found out about them yesterday. Dear Santa…
Absolutely. The whole genre of dubstep is based on FM synthesis :)
So, the DX designers avoid this by adding keyboard scaling for the operators - as you play higher up the keyboard, sounds could reduce the amount of modulation applied, and hence reduce the level of the aliases till they were inaudible. Unfortunately if done too aggressively, this will lead to a noticeable reduction in the harmonic complexity of the tone, which is perceived as a dull tone.
One of the main DX7 patents talks about adding an averaging filter in the path of the feedback mechanism. Averaging the current sample with the last one helps prevent the high-frequency aliasing. There's also a 16Khz low-pass filter on the main output.
Here's a very in-depth look at the behaviour of feedback FM: https://ristoid.net/modular/fm_variants.html
When implemented on modern hardware, wouldn't it be possible to run the algorithm at a higher CPU processing speed, to reduce the aliasing at the higher notes, and avoid the need for keyboard scaling and thus preserve the timbre of the higher pitched notes?
The problem is that, say, a piano keyboard runs from 30Hz to 4Khz, so to get an even tone, at the top of the keyboard, you are only hearing 4 harmonics of the fundamental, whilst at the bottom, you potentially have roughly 1,000 harmonics in the audible spectrum.
Without fiddling with the voice with keyboard scaling, that same tone with 1,000 harmonics played at the top of the keyboard will generate a 4Mhz frequency, so you'd need a 2Mhz sample rate to avoid the aliases reflecting into the audible spectrum.
So that's 45x oversampling, which is a scary amount of effort to throw at the problem, to resolve the issue for this one contrived sound.
Now if you modify the above sound, and double the modulating frequency (the operator pitch) then you'll double the oversampling required, and you have basically limitless control to create higher and higher levels of harmonics to tame, so you can always fiddle with the setting to produce aliasing if you try hard enough :)
Ken Shirriff has also done some amazing work analysing the DX7's sound chips: https://www.righto.com/2021/11/reverse-engineering-yamaha-dx...
A really awesome documentary on the DX7 by MadFame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXt_NXjc7oY
There are a lot of software emulations of the DX7 that are quite realistic, like the amazing Dexed. Here's one that deserves a lot of credit for how accurate it is: https://github.com/chiaccona/VDX7
https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/server/api/core/bitstreams/803386d...
I read "bit-accurate" and immediately went Ctrl+F "rate": "It then resamples from the native 49khz sample rate", yeah, this one is serious!
https://github.com/everythingwillbetakenaway/DX7-Supercollid...
https://www.arturia.com/products/software-instruments/dx7-v/...
About Chowning and the DX7 https://youtu.be/Mu8lHX-xuSg
Other videos about FM and contemporary applications https://youtu.be/Pl7BY4C9Cg4 and https://youtu.be/Uoiqy5mkUKE
Aboout Synclavier https://youtu.be/G5T7NBLSY0c
You would feed the synth some audio and the synclavier would attempt at reproducing the audio snippet through FM synthesis.
We live in that future.
Synclavier Regen weighs in at $2.5K, but then again, it was never a budget brand in the first place:
1. Download and install dexed: https://asb2m10.github.io/dexed/
2. Download and unpack https://hsjp.eu/downloads/Dexed/Dexed_cart_1.0.zip
3. In dexed, load the cartridge "Original Yamaha/DX7 ROM/ROM1A"
4. Load the preset E PIANO 1 and play some Whitney Houston
5. Load the present BASS 1 and play the intro to Danger Zone. Listen to how note velocity affects the attack!
Also, something I have only just noticed... if using the on-screen keyboard, the lower down the key you click, the harder the note is struck.
Part of the character of the sound, aside from the whole FM-with-feedback deal, was how abrupt and coarse the envelope steps were. There was no averaging or fine interpolation; just the brutality of fast integer math.
The 4-operator FM synths that Yamaha produced from the DX100 (OPP/YM2164) onwards get that characteristic 'lo-fi' sound from the length of the log-sin table. The 4-operator chips used 256 samples for the quarter log-sin wave, whereas the DX7 had 1024 samples. As you increase the length of the sine table, the timbre gets much 'smoother'.
See also: https://www.righto.com/2021/11/reverse-engineering-yamaha-dx...
For the longest time (over 30 years) I've thought that things like the OPL3 were analog. I had no idea that those synth things were happening in numberland.
Very wrong. The Prophet 5, Oberheim 4/8 voice, Roland Jupiter 8, MemoryMoog, and especially the Yamaha CS80 were all available before the DX7, and very widely used on stage and in the studio.
But they really were stupendously expensive - far too expensive for mere mortals.
(There were also fully polyphonic string synthesizers, which had a very, very simple synthesizer under each note, but they were based more on vintage organ technology.)
So by the time the DX7 appeared, Roland and Korg had already produced semi-analog) instruments with digitally controlled oscillators and analog everything else.
The DX7 stood out because the keyboard responded to velocity, and it had an incredible 16 notes of polyphony. So you could play your fancy jazz chords on the epiano sound with the sustain pedal down, and the notes would respond to your fingers and wouldn't cut off too obviously.
The maximum for a pure analog polysynth was 8 notes, and cheaper models had between four and six notes. No fancy jazz chords. Especially not with sustain.
And the DX7 sound cut through - it was much thinner and more acoustic-sounding. The big analog polysynths sounded much bigger - lush, but less versatile, because they were best suited to string and brass fill-in pads, occasional special FX, and perhaps the occasional lead.
Yamaha did try to take synthesis up another level with physical modelling, which is based on more precise models of strings, reeds, pipes, and other resonators, and they produced a couple of very interesting, very very expensive instruments, before abandoning the tech. Sampling is better for imitating real sounds, and the synthetic sounds you get from physical modelling mostly don't sound all that much more interesting than FM.
We're about due another revolution, because there's so much processor power now a lot of synthesis techniques that used to be impossible are now practical. But culturally there just isn't the interest in experimentation. Electronic sounds live in a few small niches - even with modular - and there's not much of a push to explore outside of them.
> but almost all digital music production these days is based on sampling
This is very much not true. Subtractive and FM synthesis are still very widely used.
Some had total polyphony though, by using divide down oscillators.
> The DX7 stood out because the keyboard responded to velocity, and it had an incredible 16 notes of polyphony. So you could play your fancy jazz chords on the epiano sound with the sustain pedal down, and the notes would respond to your fingers and wouldn't cut off too obviously.
The dx7 was capable of making sounds that were simply impossible to create with regular analogue subtractive synthesis, because FM (phase modulation in practice) allowed drastic tonal changes in a timbre "through time". So the attack of a patch could have a completely different "waveform" than its release, thanks to operator interaction. That's what the true novelty, a realism no analogue synth could achieve.
There’s Sequential Prophet 5 all over Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense. Van Halen famously used an Oberheim. Basically any record in the first half of the 80s if it had synths.
They've gotten a lot of professional musicians to rave about it so I'm not convinced experimentation is all that dead.
Osmose isn't the only PM around either. Pianoteq, one of the most popular piano plugins, is pure physical modeling and sounds fantastic (though I wouldn't call this "experimental"). Some of the workstation keyboards use PM too.
I guess this is true, but the next thing to come along that made me leave the DX7 at home was an Ensoniq EPS-16+.
I think FM is inferior at this if only because harmonics/overtones have less variability.
DX7 patches have this way of layering with each other that feels both clear and warm at the same time. They don't accumulate mud in the same way that sample-based instruments do. They do have this challenge of accumulating digital-sounding cruft, but I think this is part of their gritty, organic beauty.
Okay but that said I'd love to experience a stereo GPU-based FM synth with high dynamic range and a fully configurable operator graph.
- Keyboard velocity maxes out at 100 and the action sucks.
- Membrane buttons.
- Weighs way too much.
- Dinky 2-line screen for controlling dozens and dozens of parameters using one slider.
You can run the entire thing completely correct off of a chip the size of a fingernail these days, so there's no practical reason to own one. No wonder the prices have dunked lately. Even the FB-01 is a much better proposition, at least it only takes up half a rack.
It makes FM programming enjoyable.
I never figured Dexed or FM-7 out, even though the soft synths and the screen real estate would seem like an ideal match for FM synthesis.
But no, I feel like I only started to grok FM with Reface DX.
Apart from that, with music equipment, it's completely different than with computers. In our case, great hardware becomes outdated and goes out of use. You could say it disappears forever because its time has passed. With music equipment, it's entirely different. There, everything remains compatible, almost nothing "goes out of use" and it cannot become obsolete.
If you're not committed to hardware, a nice midi controller and a software synth will let you learn without spending big bucks. And even then the midi controller is optional.
Minifreak
buying used off of ebay / reverb is fine
Or get a Arturia MiniLab 3, it comes with a synth package and can control anything on your computer.
Good free synths:
- Dexed
- Vital
- Odin
- Pianobook / Decent Sampler
You can't tweak the parameters of a filter envelope if it's "printed" to a sample.
You might sample a variety of different envelopes, but there's still fundamentally no way you can get the sound of the filter attack gradually increasing using samples.
You could replicate the most common behavior, though.
It still holds up today as it did back then for anyone trying to get into synths.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFa4_po__8wMNscyFfDy6...
If the later DX mark II is anything like the TX81z (which is also said to have a 16 bit DAC) it actually uses a 16 bit dynamic range DAC, but with a 10 bit resolution (a YM3012 for the TX - https://www.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/pdf/1179489/YAMAH...)
This is definitely the age of interesting DACs, with all sorts of interesting noise profiles. We're really spoilt these days with the quality from delta/sigma DACs, thinking that this has always been the case!
Pretty damn powerful, and a "pure" synthesizer. Too complicated for a lot of musicians.
Things really took off, when samplers hit the scene. People were much more comfortable modifying existing sounds, as opposed to creating them from whole cloth.
Divide-down synths like the Arp Solina and Omni were widely used in live bands and weren’t that difficult to trek around for the period. Certainly lighter than the contemporary transistor organs of the era
True Analog polysynths were also used extensively live going back to the late 70s with the arrival of the Prophet 5, Roland Jupiter 4 - and by the early 80s (before the DX7 arrived) there were a tons of artists performing with them live.
I can recommend FM Theory and Applications by Musicians for Musicians for everyone who wants to create own patches:
https://www.burnkit2600.com/manuals/fm_theory_and_applicatio...
Also, Korg makes the Volca FM, which is actually a clone of the original Yamaha engine and you can actually directly load DX7 patches into it.
>There remains a niche interest in generating instrumental sounds using mathematical modelling, but almost all digital music production these days is based on sampling.
Yeah...that's just completely untrue.
EDIT: I found this [1], which comes close but does not have bluetooth.
I don't quite know why but the author is really correct on synth strings. I've got a few friends who are fantastic semi pro strings players and the expressionism of their instruments are phenomenal -- I've sung with them a lot and played orchestrally as well. Synth strings inevitably sound like synth strings. I'm sure there's a realistic sampler somewhere on the planet but I've never come remotely close to discovering one that is any good ...
Sampled strings cen be really convincing. Listen e.g. to https://vi-control.net/community/threads/phaeton-symphony-by...
Edit: It wasn't a custom controller, image in reply.
https://reverb.com/item/21724471-jellinghaus-dx-programmer-f...
Processing power prevented a lot of fun possibilities, if one day consumer CPU become power enough to do 1Mhz upsampled DSP with ease, we can brute-force a lot weirder wave shaping algorithms without too much aliasing.
It seems to have been quite closely related to the DX7 though, based on some info I found:https://www.vintagesynth.com/yamaha/dx11
Greg Kihn Band Breakup Song with the unforgettable lyric, "they don't write 'em like that any more" did not use the DX7 at least because it was not available in 1981, but the keyboardist Gary Philips was known to use Minimoog, Prophet-5, Wurlitzer, Rhodes and Yamaha pianos with the band. In 1983 Gary Philips was an early adopter of the DX7. They don't make them like that any more either.
As an aside, I find it's a bit weird how overlooked the Greg Kihn Band is in current 80s culture. It might not have been as big as Michael Jackson or Chicago but they were quite well known. Weird Al even did a parody of one of their songs but their cultural impact seems to have not survived as well as other acts of that era, which is a pity.
What the article says is true, the DX7 sound dominated pop music for a long time.
Many musicians were too uncreative (or perhaps it was too much of a hassle) to change it from the boring, over-used factory pre-sets. I seem to recall it was really, REALLY an unpleasant chore to make interesting sounds-- endless modes and everything set up with a single button.
For clarity, the later 4 op FM chips, have multiple wave forms and provide a sonic space as powerful as the earlier sine wave only six Op chips…they are not identical but equivalent.
There was the FM7 before. It already fixed the UX/UI problems of the hardware version.
Is this true? How and why? I imagine the square basis also contributed to the brilliance, not being band-limited.
A pure sine wave has only one harmonic.
You need to add up a bunch of sine waves of different frequencies (multiples of the fundamental) to get something as, in a way, unnatural as a square (or sawtooth) wave.
That's why they're great building blocks for subtractive synthesis too. Pass them through a resonant filter, and you get something interesting.
They are also very easy to make digitally (a square wave is just on-off-on-off..).
Analog (subtractive) synths are very much back in popularity right now and they offer lots of knobs to give bwahgrrrssshhhhwow type transformations
...but Yamaha Reface DX does.
I've been changing the sound while playing the synth to go from the ePiano preset to an aggressive synth lead as a demo of that interface.
It's pure joy, and an underrated piece of hardware.
I was in college in the 90s. My roommate had a PC with a Soundblaster card, and he played this Star Wars game incessantly. It has a terrible, insipid, repetitive, infuriatingly annoying soundtrack that I grew to despise with every molecule of my being, mostly because I was subjected to it as an eternal everlasting torment, but also because I had an Amiga and my computer was clearly superior in every way especially when it came to sound.
Anyway, hearing this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TexOZwatuLg - constantly caused me to associate all FM sounds, even in good music, with this cheap "wah wah wah ee ee wah wah wah" noise, which I've only partly shaken decades after the trauma. Also, when he wasn't playing that one, he was playing this Dune game (https://youtu.be/gOscXf0Fpmk?si=hUZ8g0GZ48CKfKzh&t=7394) with a more varied but equally cheap sound, and on top of that playing the game triggers the most repetitive samples ever devised by man. Reporting, acknowledged, reporting, acknowledged... oh, the torture.
Where was I? Ah, that's why I'm not a fan of FM synthesizers.
For a software recreation of the DX7, see the Dexed plugin.
Nightmare to program by hand on the fly, but it has its classic sounds.
But I can’t deny that the end result was startlingly realistic in general, though obviously still a bit overdone.
There are good keyboard controllers that you can plug into a Eurorack if you're a Eurorack player. Many synths haverack mount versions. You're missing nothing in that sense.
Your question isn't about the industry. It's about musicians. You're asking why musicians other than you still want complete instruments.
The answer is simple. People who play other instruments need other instruments. Of which the keyboard can be an integral part.
You might as well ask why people still buy hardware synths when perfectly good software synthesizers exist.
The answer is the same: they play differently (that applies both to the machines and the performers).
Here are some reasons why synths come with built-in keyboards.
The most important reason:
— Keyboards are mechanical instruments with particular response curves. The patches the synth comes with can be optimized to play and sound good on the keyboard the synth ships with.
This guarantees quality out-of-the-box, consistency, and makes it so that your presets would feel the same when your play them on another device.
Yamaha DX-7 played with an 88 weighted keys keyboard is a different, and a worse instrument. As is a Clavinova played when DX-7 as a controller.
— Ergonomics matter. Each synthesizer is unique in the way it builds its sounds, which is why many come with dedicated controls (buttons, knobs, sliders, screens).
Where these controls are in relation to the keyboard matters.
I can play drum pads while playing the keys on my Akai Mini Play 3, for example, but not on my larger Yamahas. I can tweak the patches on the Reface DX live, but not if I used the MX-88 as a controller.
— Physical layout matters. Performers to look the audience, not the knobs; the audience wants the performer to look at them.
Memorizing the layout by touch isn't possible when the layout isn't fixed.
For gigging musicians, the following are important:
— portability
— physical robustness
— time to set up on stage
— space on stage
— physical setup
— ability to move while performing
Having more cables to connect isn't something gigging musicians want when you have 5 minutes to set up for a 30 minute set at a dimly lit bar.
And then there's the setup. You put a stand on a stage, there goes your controller. Where does the synth go? Oh, you need another table or stand for the synth.
Now to tweak a patch. Your controller may not have all the knobs your synth engine uses. The sound module has them, but it's on the table over there, while you're playing facing the audience over here. Bummer.
Finally, I have straps for some of my keyboards, so I can move around the stage during the show.
1/4" cables are long, and made to withstand abuse; USB plugs agent, and MIDI cables, while better, aren't made for that either.
There are also marketing reasons:
— A synth that people can try in a store is more appealing than one they can't. Rackmount synths don't make for good displays.
If people have inconsistent experience trying the instrument, it doesn't bode well for the brand.
— When someone plays a Nord keyboard, you know it, because it has a distinctive look. Musicians take note of other musicians' gear.
— An instrument that can't make any sound on its own is not an instrument, it's a module.
It's a different product.
And then we get to psychological reasons:
— Performers are deeply attached to their instruments.
A sound module without a keyboard isn't an instrument. A controller isn't an instrument. Together, they form a system made up of components; it doesn't feel as an instrument the same way a guitar does.
— Looks matter. Performers want to look good on stage. And a generic controller simply doesn't look as good as a complete instrument, with a dedicated interface.
— Feels matter. The feedback one gets from touching and playing the instrument affects the performance.
And that's before we get into things like:
— busking
— jamming with other people
— playing outdoors (I played my Reface DX in the mountains and at campfires, in the streets and on the road)
The TL;DR, though, is that if you want a controller for your Eurorack, you've got it.
Saying that's how everyone should make music, though, is quite a reach.
Pretty nice model m clones.
Relating to it's influence on 80s music, this oft repeated claim is laughable. Tom Oberheim and the late Dave Smith had demonstrably greater influence with the OB-X* and Prophet lines reigning supreme and offering lasting sonic contributions.
Nothing touches FM's velocity responsiveness until physical modeling, it sounds lame when you get used to it, but the same thing is true to the romplers that replaced it.
>Relating to it's influence on 80s music
80s is quite broad, claims like this basically just showed which artists the writer prefer. Personally, it's PPG and Moog.
??? You can make any synthesis velocity responsive. Oberheim had it, there were Rolands in the DCO era. Vangelis mastered it on the CS80.
The DX7 simply made velocity sensitive keys widely available, and critically Yamaha baked velocity sensitivity into every patch.
With FM, modifying an operator envelope can result in a completely different sound. A well-crafted patch that takes advantage of this, played by a good keyboardist, will feel alive, in a way traditional synths of that time couldn't achieve.
To the analog fans it’s VCOs that feel alive, whereas the DX7 is cold and sterile. It’s all a matter of what timbres you enjoy.
No. One of the most popular piano VSTs on the market is Pianoteq, which uses physical modelling of the instrument rather than being sample-based. It's often considered one of the most realistic-sounding piano VSTs all the same (they have models of many popular acoustic models, authorized by their builders), and offers a much higher degree of dynamism and reactivity than sample-based ones, and much more flexibility in simulated microphone placement, etc.
This approach is still leading-edge in places.
