[sdiy] Yamaha DXy DCO's

[Czech Martin]

> table lookups.  The DX7 also deserves a lot of credit for turning a
> technical limitation into a whole new expressive tool.

No doubt. But people did not understand. Instead to wellcome this
"not of this earth sound" they complained that "the piano does not
sound like piano". Emulation of existing is still very important
to people, exloring new sounds is only for some geeks.

But I have to say that the concept of keys and key triggered
envelopes (or MIDI) has some serious impact on the results that are possible.
Those envelopes together with the specific way the Bessel functions
wobble force a special characteristic on the possible sound
output, or in other words: pretty limited.

I recently programmed a two operator phase modulator with arbitrary
piece wise linear "envelopes" for amplitude and frequency
as afternoon entertainment. Quick job, very simple, no GUI.

I was supprised: very interesting sounds came out of it that I never
got from my TG77.

The question of "how many operators are needed" is perhaps not so important.
For some time I have archived 10000+ sound programs.
It is allready difficult to control a stack of 3 or 4.
the 6 operator stack is often only used to get sharper edges (saw),
i.e. all 1:1 ratios. Many sound programs use stacks of two operators.

It is control of the operators that makes the difference.
Well, DX7 & co. had modulation wheel, etc., but this could not be routed
freeely to all possible parameters with sufficient resolution.
Those instruments would have really needed a modulation matrix in order
to get out of it what is really possible.

Perhaps too difficult for the DX7, but not for the later models.
You can modify all parameters via Sysex in realtime, though.

m.c.