[sdiy] FPGA Synth Music

[Scott Nordlund]

>>Anyway I guess you probably know that the DX7, etc. used a single phase adder/sine ROM/
>>accumulator thing with a 96 stage shift register to share it between all the operators.
>>It's not hard to get different algorithms this way; the data is routed differently
>>depending which operator is, uh, operating.
>
> I know very little (close to nothing) about the DX7. My plan wasn't to clone it nor to develop a
> synth that does all of the algorithms of a DX7, rather just to get more than 2-OP generators. The
> scheme I'm considering will not do all of the DX7 algorithms, but it will do many of them and some
> that the DX7 cannot do.
 
Sure, but my point was that FM was the first "interesting" and versatile form of digital
synthesis to really hit the mass market, and for a good reason: with clever implementation,
it could be done very efficiently.  96 operators on a single VLSI is pretty good for 1983,
right?  Everything else out there was either way more basic (Casio's "consonant-vowel"
stuff) and/or way more expensive (everything else at the time).  If you took advantage of 
some of Yamaha's optimizations, you could have more operators and polyphony than you know
what to do with, and still at a really good sample rate.  Plus I think the "time sharing 
via shift register" thing does make it easier to deal with multiple algorithms.
 
But, you know, as always the synth engine is kinda the easy part. Finding a way to control
all of that might be a real challenge.  People who make analog modulars take the easy way 
out, interface wise. 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469230/direct/01/