[sdiy] Yamaha DXy DCO's

[Cornutt, David K]

> From: Czech Martin [mailto:Martin.Czech at micronas.com]
> 
> 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.

No doubt.  The DX7 was probably the first synth that sold in large
numbers to people who didn't "play synth".  I knew several people
who bought one essentially as a replacement for a Rhodes piano.
Such people never even listened to all of the factory presets,
much less do anything with the edit menus.  In fact, in the circles
I ran in down in S. Florida, by 1987 the DX piano and bass
sounds had gotten to be such a cliche that some of the people
who had bought them for that purpose were starting to sell them.

> 
> 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.

I've had an experience a bit like that just playing with the
limited FM capability in Absynth.  Although only 2-op is
possible, it will let you draw arbitrary envelopes and route
them to the mod index or carrier freq or wherever you want them.
And it has some filtering too.  Although I haven't done much
FM with it yet, I've already gotten a couple of things that
I spent years trying to do with my CX5M.  (Still haven't 
managed to replicate that CX5M sitar patch I had, though.)

> 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.

I agree, but I can see possibilities for using more operators
if you consider something like mixing modulations vector-
synthesis style, and then using that to drive a carrier mix
which is also being produced by a vector.  Start using
vectors of three or more dimensions, and you could really
eat up some operators.