111–120 of 225 posts
> And once we have sampling technology, there’s little point using computational techniques to make the once-novel sounds of earlier synthesizers: we can just sample the instruments themselves 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 i…
One of my favorite videos on the internet involves DX7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eL_N3A5gVhQ
But I can’t deny that the end result was startlingly realistic in general, though obviously still a bit overdone.
As a former owner and synth head, I feel the DX7 was good for poorly simulating a broad range of superior instruments. Also it wasn't merely difficult to program - it made sound design a necessarily separate activity from playing due to the notorious programming UX. Revolutionary and a nifty museum piece. Relating to it's influence on 80s music, this oft repeated claim is laughable. Tom Oberheim and the late Dave Smi…
>poorly simulating a broad range of superior instruments 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.
>These instruments were mostly of academic interest – I can’t think of any band that used one on stage (but I could be wrong). 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 fu…
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.
For a software recreation of the DX7, see the Dexed plugin.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The DX7 might be the best selling synth of all time. There's a lot of them out there.
> 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.
It seems to have been quite closely related to the DX7 though, based on some info I found:https://www.vintagesynth.com/yamaha/dx11
>These instruments were mostly of academic interest – I can’t think of any band that used one on stage (but I could be wrong). 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 fu…