[sdiy] Yamaha DXy DCO's

[Jonathan Lippard]

At 04:05 PM 2/17/2004 -0800, you wrote:

>Now, not trying to stick up for Yamaha, BUT it's the manner in which they
>incorporated polyphony which gave these instruments their trademark thin
>sound - which I believe is actually cycling through single pitches at an
>incredibly fast rate.

I'd be interested in hearing you elaborate on this.  No bones to pick, just 
curious...

>Also bare in mind (and this goes down as the saddest
>moment in the biggest deal in synth history) the machine at Stanford they
>bought the technology rights for consisted of something like 256 operators
>(digital VCO/EG pairs) on one side, and 256  sound modifiers (filters among
>other things) on the other .  They just elected to squish that down to 6
>operators and no sound modifiers.  It wasn't until later they they released
>FM based machines that had these effect modifiers in them.    With
>someth9ing like 500,000 DX7s sold, it surely wasn't a bad decision on some
>levels, but for us tweek geeks....

I'll posit that after a certain level of complexity the number of 
parameters available to tweak begins to present a serious learning curve in 
getting to know an instrument.  Balancing the flexibility of a synth 
against ease of use practically requires some narrowing of scope.  I find 
additive synthesis very interesting and it gives some damn nice 
results...but it takes a lot more time to get them.  Hence, I don't really 
use it.

Someone else noted the lack of filters on the original DX series, but I'll 
comment here--I'm willing to bet it was a tradeoff against the amount of 
processor power available at the time.  Yamaha probably could've added 
filters but it might have doubled the price of the DX-7.  Or maybe they 
just decided there were enough ways to get filtered-sounding FM tones 
without having to do the math.

-Jonathan

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