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They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

kevinboone.me

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Re: They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

#171

Post by Suppafly »

onemoresoop wrote: post #131
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yamaha reface dx goes for 250 on the used market. It’s totally worth the money if you understand its limitations.

oh cool, i've looked at the reface line but didn't realize they go down to that cheap.

Re: They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

#172

Post by Suppafly »

pjc50 wrote: post #135
Suppafly wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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+.

Hundreds of dollars for an antique long out of production seems extremely reasonable to me. I'm not sure what you were expecting, $10? It's also a pretty substantial object. They have a metal case! It's quite a large and heavy thing to ship and store.

>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.

Re: They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

#173

Post by jacobr1 »

_7acn wrote: post #91

But they still make great stuff like Korg Volca FM or Dirtywave M8 and many, many other beautiful synths! 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 In our case, great hardware becomes outdated and goes out of use.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 nothi…

Any recommendations for a starter synth? Something polyphonic, and has the ability to mess around to create new sounds (so analogue controls, but it could still be digital behind the scenes). I'd like some presets, but not be limited to them. What is on the market at a reasonable price point (under or around $500) that fits this profile?

Re: They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

#174

Post by nkingsy »

coldtea wrote: post #152
alterom wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 w…

> 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…

Me? I downloaded a wurly patch “wurly logic” that I can pretty much play like a piano on the reface dx.

I bring it camping all the time.

Re: They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

#175

Post by steve1977 »

miunau wrote: post #20

My DX7 take is this: I don't think time has made any other synth less desirable to own than the original DX7's. - 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 pract…

The key action sucks? The FS keybed is considered one of the best synth actions by many, it’s interesting you say that. It was used in the Korg M1 and other Korg synths for example and lives on as the lead-free FSX in the Montage flagship synths of Yamaha.

Re: They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

#176

Post by nine_k »

jdietrich wrote: post #147
rvense wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 diffic…

Subtractive is intelligent design. FM is discovery :)

Re: They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

#177

Post by crispyambulance »

I hope they DON'T make them like the DX7 anymore.

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.

Re: They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

#178

Post by Supernaut »

consf wrote: post #162
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #108

>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…

The key difference, though, as you pointed out, was the price. These analog synths were incredibly expensive, which limited their accessibility to major artists

Nothing brings home quite how much money there was to be made in the music industry in the '80s as seeing the top bands' keyboard rigs. In the video for "The Reflex", Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes is surrounded by a Fairlight CMI, a Jupiter-8 and a Prophet-5. Adjusting for inflation, that's about $250,000 worth of equipment.

Re: They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard

#180

Post by mrandish »

coldtea wrote: post #18

> 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 synthe…

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...

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