>With hindsight, the DX7 and its ilk look like a weird diversion in the path of musical progress. Operator synthesis makes no logical sense. It became popular because we had the capability to do digital sound generation, but lacked the technology to do it in a comprehensible, systematic way. So the DX7 enjoyed huge popularity for a few years, before fading into obscurity.
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...
FM/PM synthesis makes no "logical sense"... until you spend the twenty minutes required to understand it.
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.
FM is inherently more difficult to understand than subtractive, even with a very good interface. It's the double-edged sword of FM - you can create very complex behaviours from a small number of simple operators, which makes FM both uniquely powerful and uniquely difficult to think about intuitively.
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.
I heartily recommend the Korg Opsix to anyone who wants to experiment with FM synthesis.
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.
The Opsix looks very straightforward. I bought the Digitone Keys about three years ago and it's a lot of fun, along with having that sequencer and Elektron Interface. It does not appear to have been a successful product, and I do not think it's really possible to use a full instrument, but I have enjoyed using it as a plaything to learn and understand FM synthesis. No doubt there is some creative wizard like Blue Lab Beats who probably uses this and a Digitakt to make whole albums.
For people interested in this product but not sure buying a hardware synth: opsix native is the name for the software only version of it available at the Korg website…
They also didn't get why FM synthesis was so appealing, in spite of being difficult to understand for the common musician.
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.
>Well, let's be clear: the speakers are just for noodling.
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.
>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.
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.
It’s a very portable synth, the small factor, the included speakers and 6xAA battery operation give it playability on the go. I for one use it at home due to limited available space, I use the power adapter and ignore the built in speaker.
The DX-7 is one of the era-defining music instruments like the CS-80 and the TR808 among others. Here you you can hear some tracks that feature it (complete with weird hair too)
Well, samplers are also musical instruments in their own right.
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.
Could you recommend a patch set for the reface? I bought mine off someone who had some great presets and I loved it, but one day I accidentally factory reset it and there's only a few factory defaults that are really musical as you say.
There's a guy who is a genius at creating Reface DX patches, and he uploads them all for free on SoundMondo.
I recommend everyone checking this video to see how wonderful Reface DX can sound. After discovering those patches I've sold my Reface CP because I've liked the DX simulated Rhodes just as much.
I gave away my Reface DX after I figured out that the non-tactile capacitative touch buttons would trigger randomly when exposed to sunlight while I played it in the park.
>I gave away my Reface DX after I figured out that the non-tactile capacitative touch buttons would trigger randomly when exposed to sunlight while I played it in the park.
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.
I remember that some keys would randomly stop responding on mine as well. That was frustrating. I do not view having to take apart a modern Yamaha digital synthesizer to make it work as acceptable.
Attempt to summarize one part (the “playability”): You are suggesting the velocity curves and their interaction with the algorithms gave the DX7 a lot of its nuance?
Fine tuning with curves and offsets is what made DX programming an
art.
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.
Interesting! I share a keen interest in synthesizers.
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.
As far as I know the engineering standards within Yamaha are excellent
and consistent. From what I've heard DX9 patches sound perfect from
DX7 but without velocity, and TX7, TX816 and other modules sound
identical. Also DX7 patches import perfectly into later Yamaha FM
products.
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.
Agreed. It's nice that the TFA is celebrating the DX7 because it was absolutely a seminal synth but it's a pretty uninformed take on FM synthesis. Depending on how you count there's really only a handful of fundamental synthesis approaches used for musical tone generation (subtractive, additive, granular, wavetable and frequency modulation). Most synthesizers being made today just use evolved forms and combinations of these basic techniques. As you said, FM synthesis is one of those fundamental building blocks and it didn't go away. Instead, it went pretty much everywhere - including into the ringtone chips in the vast majority of mobile phones of the early 2000s.
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...
DX7s don't go for a high price. The market is flooded with them. If you pay more than $600, you paid too much. You can easily find one in the $400 range.
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).
>And of course even vintage DX7s go for a quite high price in second+ hand market...
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 are still excellent midi keyboards, in addition to an iconic synth engine. So I suspect DX7s are more widely applicable, and thus are much sought after, which keeps the prices not very low.
I read sometwhere that the DX7IID had corrected the original DX7's whimpy full velocity numbers delivery but found that not to tbe the case. I felt I had to use an Anatek POCKET CURVE with its dedicated DX7 compensation curve and beyond when using my IID to program the TX802 and 81Z.
> The DX7 might be the best selling synth of all time
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.
I think the cheapest you could reasonably expect to get a useable synth with a decent keyboard is $300, independent of age and coolness. That's where you'll find a Microkorg or a Mininova or something.
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.
Plenty of people hoard classic synths like trophy pieces and never use them. Which sucks for people interested in making music or starting a new hobby with some old gear.
It’s probably one of the most popular things to do in the music scene.
It's not so bad as long as the gears are taken good care of, if this isn't a thing we'll find them defunct in a dumpster yard. There are still positives about having a vintage collector scene, like USB floppy emulator kits, LCD kits, new mods, hacks, sharing old drivers etc.
>Hundreds of dollars for an antique long out of production seems extremely reasonable to me. I'm not sure what you were expecting, $10?
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.
The DX7 is literally the only synth I've heard of. Well, that and the DX9 and the mini moog. Don't count the Fairlight since it's basically a computer.
> Don't count the Fairlight since it's basically a computer.
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.
Some great synths are taxing to operate and tweak in real time even if you know what is happening. So I appreciate your point about variations on the interface.
From what follows after that I think they were referring to the configuration interface being effectively unusable by most people when they said “makes no logical sense“.
The tiny LCD UI was a typical cost-cutting measure for synths from that era and isn't unique to FM or even digital synths.
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.
I'd argue the opposite, the DX7 worked great because it came with good presets and you could expand it with those cartriges, although programming your own was annoying as heck. But most people cared about getting the newest sounds and at max tweaking them slightly, which was a pain. But the FM engine was/is immensly powerful and the sounds are to that day extremely iconic.
I have a MODX and although it’s so damn powerful when it comes to sound design - each of the 16 parts can have 8 layers each, it’s a lot of work to do anything with it.
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.
But what's the point of making piano patches that sound realistic, except as a tour de force? It's sort of a "Pierre Menard, author of Quixote" sort of thing.
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.
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)
Patches / parameter sets / whatever else you call the way to describe it are way more compact and should be much less expensive, shouldn't they? I honestly would expect a competent (if not exquisite) grand piano to be among presets in a good synthesizer.
>But what's the point of making piano patches that sound realistic, except as a tour de force? It's sort of a "Pierre Menard, author of Quixote" sort of thing.
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).
This is true, but this likely has to be done once, by the manufacturer? Or maybe several times, in search of perfection. But likely it's not what every musician is expected to do. Also, doing this should still be easier than building your own physical grand piano :)
yeah I don't know how about making one personally, but physical modeling (particularly Pianoteq) is near best-in-class if you want a highly realistic piano sound that you can then tweak to your personal preference over something more traditional like a Sampler lib such as Kontakt's The Gentleman.
I would be extremely interested in a video or article describing that kind of patch (one with a physical analogue/interpretation). Are you referring to something specific?
Yes, I have a hobby of implementing physical modeling synths. I am off the deep end in digital waveguide synthesis, and I was curious about the FM equivalent.
I’m pretty sure my original comment was referring to a YouTube video I saw of physically modelling a piano on the Montage. Can’t find the video now though :(
… but if you’re into modelling… man, I’m hankering for an Erica Synth Steampipe! Just found out about them yesterday. Dear Santa…
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...