Yamaha’s DX7 synthesiser changed modern music • Hacker News Board

Re: Yamaha’s DX7 synthesiser changed modern music

#81

Post by klodolph » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

ratww wrote: post #37

klodolph wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest synth from the current era will be the eurorack. Yes, it’s really a form factor and not a synth but it’s taken off in the past few years in a really startling way.

Maybe in influence... it helped kickstart the modular revival and even made other form factors popular again. But in number of absolute units in operation, I don't know... Unless we compare number of modules sold vs number of Microkorgs. Modulars are expensive!

I think the difference is that units like the microKORG will come and go, but new units will often be in Eurorack form or be somehow compatible.

Eurorack can be expensive, but Behringer came out with a line that includes the Model D, Neutron, Pro-1, K-2, Wasp, and CAT—they’re all cheap, they’re all complete synths, and they’re also all Eurorack modules that can be plugged into a larger system.

Moog is also selling synthesizer modules that are actually Eurorack form, but upscale from Behringer.

I don’t have a modular synth, but it’s getting harder to avoid Eurorack.

Re: Yamaha’s DX7 synthesiser changed modern music

#82

Post by walto2 » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 6:42 PM UTC

SeanLuke wrote: post #79

walto2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A second-order digital filter requires what, about 4 stores, recalls, and multiplies per sample? This is true today using something like the Chamberlin form for a state variable filter. I don't think that level of optimization had been discovered yet in the DX7 timeframe. Also, for adequate quality you want to oversample at least 2x, preferably at least 4x. And 16 bits usually won't be enough headroom in a digital…

Well, remember the DX7 was 12 bit.

Right. My point was, digital filters won't sound good with those constraints, so people weren't using them yet.

Not to overshadow the main idea. The DX7 was a heck of a milestone.

Re: Yamaha’s DX7 synthesiser changed modern music

#83

Post by jdontillman » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 6:53 PM UTC

SeanLuke wrote: post #67

jdontillman wrote: post #4

Interesting. I agree that the article is an exaggeration. It could be argued that the DX7 had a significant negative musical contribution. Oodles of sounds at the expense of musical expression. The musician became alienated from the process of making the sound. The keyboard player's job moved from playing the piano or organ to coming up with all the accompaniment parts that aren't guitars. And the DX7 was way too dif…

> FM synthesis, as such, was not new. The Buchla synthesizer featured it in the 60's. But the critical feature of FM synthesis that made it usable as a musical element was linear FM. Early synthesizers (like, I presume Buchla's) sported "FM" but it was exponential due to volt/oct. > John Chowning refined the concept, moved from frequency to phase modulation, and brought FM into the digital realm. ?? Chowning's paper…

> > FM synthesis, as such, was not new. The Buchla synthesizer featured it in the 60's.

> But the critical feature of FM synthesis that made it usable as a musical element was linear FM. Early synthesizers (like, I presume Buchla's) sported "FM" but it was exponential due to volt/oct.

No; the first Buchla oscillator, the 158, did indeed have linear FM.

And that was intentional. Early Buchla synths didn't have much going on in the filter department, so instead he made the oscillators extra expressive.

Re: Yamaha’s DX7 synthesiser changed modern music

#84

Post by jancsika » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 6:59 PM UTC

alisonatwork wrote: post #60

ratww wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno... I disagree with the assertion that the DX7 was the synth that made synth music mainstream. A lot of pop from before was already using synths. Funkytown was a Billboard #1 hit 4 years before the DX7, and so was Vangelis, Human League, Eurythmics and Owner of a Lonely Heart a year or two after that, not to mention lots of Michael Jackson and even the Ghostbuster theme... and that's just the Billboard #1 hits…

You are correct that synth music as a genre existed before the DX7, and that synths were used in popular songs even going back into the 70s. But what this article is discussing, and what most people discuss when they talk about the DX7, is how its sales dwarfed that of any synth that came before it. It didn't just become a piece of equipment used by major studios in countless hits across many different genres, it als…

> But someone just listening to a tune on the radio, humming along to it, I don't think they're going to go "yep, that's the good ol' DX7 electric piano patch" or "yep that's a classic Strat sound".

At least in the U.S., lay people are notoriously bad at even knowing the names of instruments, much less pinpointing them in the overall musical texture.

About the only test you could do would be to, say, replace the Theremin in Good Vibrations with a string synth from the DX7. Most people have never heard of either instrument, but many would instantly recognize that something is off in that example. Probably the same if you replace a stratacaster, vocoder, etc., in a track they're familiar with, especially if you substitute it with something from a different historical period.

Other than that, I'm afraid all that's being measured is the effect of lack of funding on basic music education in the U.S. :)

Re: Yamaha’s DX7 synthesiser changed modern music

#85

Post by jdontillman » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

SeanLuke wrote: post #67

jdontillman wrote: post #4

Interesting. I agree that the article is an exaggeration. It could be argued that the DX7 had a significant negative musical contribution. Oodles of sounds at the expense of musical expression. The musician became alienated from the process of making the sound. The keyboard player's job moved from playing the piano or organ to coming up with all the accompaniment parts that aren't guitars. And the DX7 was way too dif…

> FM synthesis, as such, was not new. The Buchla synthesizer featured it in the 60's. But the critical feature of FM synthesis that made it usable as a musical element was linear FM. Early synthesizers (like, I presume Buchla's) sported "FM" but it was exponential due to volt/oct. > John Chowning refined the concept, moved from frequency to phase modulation, and brought FM into the digital realm. ?? Chowning's paper…

>> John Chowning refined the concept, moved from frequency to phase modulation, and brought FM into the digital realm.

> ?? Chowning's paper doesn't mention phase modulation at all, does it? His equation is for frequency modulation. > >https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/course/100/misc/chowning... > > I would presume that the relationships between phase and frequency modulation were known a half-century before Chowning.

Chowning says his equation is for frequency modulation, but the equation is actually phase modulation.

Chowning's equation(1):

    e = A sin(𝛼t + I sinβt)

That's phase modulation. Frequency modulation would be:

    e = A sin((𝛼 + I sinβt) t)

Very different.

That's okay; it's the first academic paper on the topic, and things were still a little wobbly.

After the paper, he and others refined the concept, moved from frequency to phase modulation, and built digital implementations.

Re: Yamaha’s DX7 synthesiser changed modern music

#86

Post by ssalazar » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 7:28 PM UTC

raphlinus wrote: post #69

noizejoy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I much prefer using the Dexed VST software based synth for recording over a DX7. The sound is hard to tell apart, the DX 7 doesn’t have a good surface for programming, has a crappy midi implementation, and doesn’t integrate into a DAW as well as a plugin. Since the DX7 is digital anyway, you also don’t loose much real or perceived “analog warmth”. Source: I have both.

Thanks, appreciate the kind words! Disclosure/shameless self-brag: I wrote the original synthesizer engine that became Dexed, though the team has moved it forward in lots of important ways. I did careful reverse engineering of an actual DX7 II, including disassembling its ROM, so the fact that it matches well should not be surprising.

Amazing work! Would love to read/learn more if you ever have the time/motivation for a blog post about it.

Re: Yamaha’s DX7 synthesiser changed modern music

#87

Post by jdontillman » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

SeanLuke wrote: post #67

jdontillman wrote: post #4

Interesting. I agree that the article is an exaggeration. It could be argued that the DX7 had a significant negative musical contribution. Oodles of sounds at the expense of musical expression. The musician became alienated from the process of making the sound. The keyboard player's job moved from playing the piano or organ to coming up with all the accompaniment parts that aren't guitars. And the DX7 was way too dif…

> FM synthesis, as such, was not new. The Buchla synthesizer featured it in the 60's. But the critical feature of FM synthesis that made it usable as a musical element was linear FM. Early synthesizers (like, I presume Buchla's) sported "FM" but it was exponential due to volt/oct. > John Chowning refined the concept, moved from frequency to phase modulation, and brought FM into the digital realm. ?? Chowning's paper…

>> Given 1983 technology, it was very difficult to implement digital audio filters, which require millions of multiplication/accumulation operations a second.

> This seems high? A second-order digital filter requires what, about 4 stores, recalls, and multiplies per sample? This would seem to be in the same level of complexity as six carrier/modulator interactions; you have to do a multiply to do a lookup after all. Or is the issue that the multiplies had to be 12-16 bit?

For microprocessors in 1983, multiply instructions, if they existed at all, involved a lot of shift and add cycles. That took a long time.

A simple filter might need 4 multiplies and accumulates. Times 44,000 times a second, for each sample. Times the number of voices; 16 in the case of the DX7.

Now you are easily over a million multiplies a second.

And even though the original DX7 is 12 bits, I think you'd need those multiplies to be 16x16 bits for accumulated error issues.

So the DX7 was an alternative to having to implement digital filters in 1983 technology. They could introduce a digital synth at a very reasonable price.

Re: Yamaha’s DX7 synthesiser changed modern music

#88

Post by SeanLuke » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 8:08 PM UTC

jdontillman wrote: post #85

SeanLuke wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FM synthesis, as such, was not new. The Buchla synthesizer featured it in the 60's. But the critical feature of FM synthesis that made it usable as a musical element was linear FM. Early synthesizers (like, I presume Buchla's) sported "FM" but it was exponential due to volt/oct. > John Chowning refined the concept, moved from frequency to phase modulation, and brought FM into the digital realm. ?? Chowning's paper…

>> John Chowning refined the concept, moved from frequency to phase modulation, and brought FM into the digital realm. > ?? Chowning's paper doesn't mention phase modulation at all, does it? His equation is for frequency modulation. > > https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/course/100/misc/chowning ... > > I would presume that the relationships between phase and frequency modulation were known a half-century before Cho…

Ah yes, that's right. The I sin Beta t is I sin(beta t), not I sin(Beta) t.

Re: Yamaha’s DX7 synthesiser changed modern music

#89

Post by SeanLuke » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 8:15 PM UTC

jdontillman wrote: post #83

SeanLuke wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FM synthesis, as such, was not new. The Buchla synthesizer featured it in the 60's. But the critical feature of FM synthesis that made it usable as a musical element was linear FM. Early synthesizers (like, I presume Buchla's) sported "FM" but it was exponential due to volt/oct. > John Chowning refined the concept, moved from frequency to phase modulation, and brought FM into the digital realm. ?? Chowning's paper…

> > FM synthesis, as such, was not new. The Buchla synthesizer featured it in the 60's. > But the critical feature of FM synthesis that made it usable as a musical element was linear FM. Early synthesizers (like, I presume Buchla's) sported "FM" but it was exponential due to volt/oct. No; the first Buchla oscillator, the 158, did indeed have linear FM. And that was intentional. Early Buchla synths didn't have much go…

> No; the first Buchla oscillator, the 158, did indeed have linear FM.

Could you point to an authoritative source on this? The Model 100 owner's manual says this about the 158: "The frequency modulation control require an external signal input, which determines the rate (speed) of the frequency modulation (vibrato)...". The fact that it says "vibrato" would imply exponential FM, wouldn't it?

https://archive.org/details/synthmanual-buchla-100-owners-ma...

Actually, after watching this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49qyPIX61rg) I'm less convinced that the 158 had linear FM. As he turns the FM knob, the pitch changes. This would be expected for exponential FM.

Re: Yamaha’s DX7 synthesiser changed modern music

#90

Post by jdontillman » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 8:55 PM UTC

jdontillman wrote: post #83

SeanLuke wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FM synthesis, as such, was not new. The Buchla synthesizer featured it in the 60's. But the critical feature of FM synthesis that made it usable as a musical element was linear FM. Early synthesizers (like, I presume Buchla's) sported "FM" but it was exponential due to volt/oct. > John Chowning refined the concept, moved from frequency to phase modulation, and brought FM into the digital realm. ?? Chowning's paper…

> > FM synthesis, as such, was not new. The Buchla synthesizer featured it in the 60's. > But the critical feature of FM synthesis that made it usable as a musical element was linear FM. Early synthesizers (like, I presume Buchla's) sported "FM" but it was exponential due to volt/oct. No; the first Buchla oscillator, the 158, did indeed have linear FM. And that was intentional. Early Buchla synths didn't have much go…

Correction; the senator meant to say the Buchla 258 oscillator had linear FM.

(Although there were variations!)

The control voltage input goes through the exponential converter, and the FM input sets the bias of the exponential converter.