The Complete DX-27/DX-100/DX9/DX11/DS55 for FM8

The Complete Yamaha DX-27/DX-100 for FM8
You asked? You receive. Free history lesson in the box.

If the DX-9 was the big embarrassment of the DX family for its design limitations, the DX-100 was the unexpected smash success. It was a board that should have failed, and didn't.

Its beefier twin, the DX-27, had the sturdier case and full-sized keys, but was otherwise identical, down to the presets and internal logic. And yet, the DX-27 is barely a step above the DX-9 on the used-gear junkpile these days. I can only imagine it's because folks don't realize that you can get all the features of the DX-100 with an added full-sized 61-key (albeit not velocity sensitive) keyboard for pittance. DX-100's are collectible. DX-27's? Doorstops. Do yourself a favor, friends, and if you can't find a good price on a DX-100, check out the DX-27. Best-kept secret. :)

But back to the DX-100.

Why should it have failed? Let's see. For one, it used the same disastrous tape hookup that the DX-9 did, and no cartridge interface. Its 49-key range was an octave short of the industry standard 61, and the keys weren't full-size -- they were mini-keys, a nightmare for hands used to standard piano keys. No velocity sensitivity. No effects. Odd layout, designed for use slung over the shoulder with a strap, Eighties style...a trend that mercifully died with Terminator sunglasses, legwarmers and cement-hold hairspray.

Why didn't it fail? Three reasons. One, it was extremely affordable. It debuted at $445 -- a steal for a genuine FM synthesizer with the same 4OP matrix we knew and loved from higher-end boards. Two, the board fixed the DX-9's memory limitation problem by offering 192 ROM presets. Three, oh, what ROM presets they were! Especially the basses -- the DX-100 has a few legendary bass preset, including Easy Synth (the famous DX-100 bass preset), Elec Bass, Mono Bass (adjust portamento to taste), WOW, Metal Keys, and its own unique spin on the sample-and-hold SH Bass. (Use the Mod Wheel to make the magic happen.) If they sound a little tinny to your ears now, remember, fat basses love tube saturation! You can use FM8's effects rack, switch on Tube Amp and Cabinet, and see an immediate fattening, or use Antares Tube, Amplitube, Vintage Channel, PSP Vintage Warmer, or your own favorite sound-sweetening tube simulation VST to make it really shine.

The general consensus is that the other presets are weak, but I'm not sure I agree with that. There are some gorgeous electric pianos, a wide range of strings (including the sublime Silk Cello), powerhouse patches like the ancestor of the V50's Powerbrass, or the eerie whalesong of Waves. I think this preset collection is really quite impressive, and given the DX-100's are quite affordable on the used market, and DX-27's even more so -- this just might be a good bet for your first 4OP synth, if you're shopping. Meanwhile, try playing with FM8's arpeggiator with one of the chromatic percussive presets, and wham, you're Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran in seconds -- those FM vibes are much cooler than his poor, sick little overdriven Wasp.

You'll hear the DX-100 featured heavily in Orbital, Scanner, and Jean-Michel Jarre's work, quite a hefty curriculum vitae for a board marketed as a low-end home synth!

Sysex dumps are included. FM7 users please accept my apologies; the FM7 version isn't ready at this time, but I've included the Sysex for you to import. Very few patches needed heavy modification; the main problem I ran into was the "too much vibrato" problem, which could be solved by setting the LFO 1 value in the matrix view to slightly more than half its current value, or the "BC patches are silent" problem, which can be circumvented by removing all BC and Controller 1 values from the matrix completely. (The synths had a switch which disabled BC/C1 dependence if these add-ons weren't plugged in, but FM7/FM8 isn't that bright.)

Enjoy, friends. One of the greatest Yamaha FM synths, for the greatest audio site online. You requested, you received.

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PASSWORD: magesy


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The Complete Yamaha DX-9 for FM8
The synthesizer you never knew you wanted...until today.

Mention you're a fan of the DX-9, and folks will stare at you. Try to convince them that the DX-9 is a worthy member of the Yamaha synth family, and they'll start throwing rocks at you until you leave town. ;)

Why the hatred? Well, when you look closely, it's not that the DX-9 was really such a horrible board...just that it had a few seriously crippling implementation flaws. At $1500 in 1983, the little brother to the time-honored $1999 DX-7 just didn't have anything to recommend him. While 4OP synthesis proved to be viable later, Yamaha didn't have the experience working with it quite yet, and the patches, while hardly tragedies, hadn't yet reached the glory days of the later DX-11 and legendary TX81Z. It certainly didn't hav the flimsy DX-2x era case mounting, the DX-100's toy keys, and while its MIDI implementation was crude, so was its big brother the DX-7's, and that sure didn't it from dominating the synth market. It wasn't velocity-sensitive, but that alone shouldn't have ended its sale life.

So what was the real disaster that killed the DX-9? I'll tell ya.

Twenty presets in RAM, and instead of easy-to-swap cartridges like the DX-7, the DX-9 supported...a cassette interface. That's right, you heard me right, working musicians -- you had to hook up a cassette player, rewind frantically between songs, pray you rewound it the right amount to get the data set you wanted, press play, start the keyboard loading, and wait, wait, wait. Hope your lead singer's chatty, 'cause between-song pauses are gonna be worse than a PBS pledge drive. ("Now, this is a little number I whipped up while deep-sea diving in the Arctic last week, that I like to think conjures up memories of Jim Morrison, Tupac, and Mozart all at once...you ready back there, Johnny? Johnny's on the keys, folks, and he saved five hundred bucks by choosing that DX-9 he's cursing at, the one with the cassette drive that's spewing ribbons of tape into his face, so let me tell ya more...")

No self-respecting working musician was going to tolerate this, and no studio was going to choose the board without the long-term support and patch library. The DX-9 never sold, never sld when FM synth came back into vogue, and now it's become that embarrassing wasteaway seen cluttering up the listing's in the Daddy's Junky Music catalogues. I half-expect, the next time I order $100 or more, to get a free one in the shipment as a gift.

Okay, so the RAM and patch-loading logistics were absolutely unforgivable. But aside from that, it wasn't that bad a board! It featured 16-note polyphony like its big brother, rock-solid case and those classic DX keys, and if you didn't mind waiting on the tape, it didn't sound half bad.

Presented for your FM8 pleasure, you'll find all six banks of 20 presets from the tape, converted to FM8 format with the occasional glitch corrected. Loading time, I think, has greatly improved, eh?

Oh, but if you miss it, don't worry. My friend who actually owns one of these things has generously recorded the tape for you, all six tracks, and I've included them in MP3 form for your listening...pleasure? You could plug the output of your sound card to a real DX-9 to load them, or you could play them and marvel that Yamaha thought any working musician would wait that long to load twenty lousy presets. (At $1500, this synth wasn't for home user.) The voice you hear is his, by the way, not mine.

Attentive users will note the HEAVY METAL patch is in bank 5 instead of one of the SYNTH LEAD patches. Later DX-9's featured this patch, even though the manual didn't update to reflect this. I don't know if the tape MP3 contains it or not -- my Sysex dumps came from a different source, as I can't do much with that tape MP3 without an actual DX-9. I was told that the patch was effectively an earlier version of HEAVY METAL designed as a piercing synth lead.

Load times and memory limitations are gone in this virtual version, and I dare say, those fixed, this is a sweet little synth, isn't it? Nicely retro, and the direct ancestor of every later 4OP synth. This was the board that proved 4OP viable, and as such, the humble and maligned DX-9 deserves its recognition among the golden age synthesizers of the FM Eighties. This was the product line that won the FM battle ultimately, and my beloved V50 traces its lineage not back to the DX-7, but to this little redheaded stepchild of the synth world.

Take a moment, friends, to pay your respects to the board that started the 4OP ball rolling. With its limitations solved virtually, it's a very worthy addition to your virtual Yamaha collection.

One more for my friends at the greatest audio site online. :)

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PASSWORD: magesy


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The Complete Yamaha DX-11 for FM7 and FM8
A masterful complete preset translation from this vintage instrument thanks to the hard work of Rancourt's fellow FM enthusiast, Babz. I can't take much credit for this, but I wanted to share it just the same.

So, we remember the TX81Z reverently, but how many of us remember that there was a synth counterpart, too? The DX-11 was a powerful little workhorse with a pretty impressive sonic arsenal, sounding more like my beloved V50 in 4OP sophistication than its predecessors in the DX21/27/100 family.

Why didn't you see more of these out there in the world? Well, the board was cursed with a few poor marketing choices. For one, the DX7s had just come out, with its flagship 6OP FM matrix, new 16-bit internal logic and 16-voice polyphony, for $1500. The DX-11, around $1100, didn't offer much to recommend it above the comparably priced YS100 (with builtin digital effects processor!) or gimmicky-looking but curiously robust B200 (essentially a YS200 with built-in speakers). With so many other choices with newer, lighter case styles, this board looked and felt "last year" to the buyers, and never really got the respect it deserved. Another Yamaha FM deck that died a quick marketing death, then became a pawn shop treasure.

This conversion is a masterwork. I don't mind saying so, because it wasn't mine -- thank fellow FM enthusiast Babz for this outstanding job. Babz loves the DX11 the way I love the V50, and this conversion was performed with the same love, care, and obsessive eye for detail found in the best and most researched of my work. I try to do my best in all my work, but I think the V50 showed a certain rapt and obsessive passion above and beyond my other releases -- a love of the synthesizer above all others. Babz feels the same way about the DX-11, and this conversion is poetry. It's not simply mathematically perfect, it's Zen calligraphy in preset form. This is a truly inspired tribute to the original instrument.

I've also included Babz's original FM7 versions, for the FM7 users.

Babz, thank you. People like you are responsible for people like me rising to the challenge, and I am very, very honored and pleased to offer your work instead of my own attempt to convert the presets, because I'm absolutely certain it couldn't possibly be better than the legendary job you've done. I am your fan, and deeply indebted to you for this marvelous gift of retro FM synth joy.

Enjoy, friends. One more Yamaha legend for you to play with, for my friends at the greatest audio site online.

PS: I was asked two questions recently that I'd like to answer, if I may. The first was "Are you planning to release every single Yamaha FM synthesizer?" The answer is: as many as imaginably possible, YES! I'm starting from the GS-1 and working forward to the end of true FM. (I don't plan to venture into the SY line and beyond.) I even have a few patches in my piles that allege to be CE20/25 patches, and I've managed to recreate the GS-2 with FM8 and Kore with a success rate I'm comfortable releasing. (The GS-1 is beyond reproduction that way, and needed samples, but the GS-2 isn't!) I believe I might be able to release the entire family of synths this way, and I'm sure enjoying trying.

The second question was one of why I'm not developing products for sale if I have the chops to make releases like the ones I've released. My answer is simple: I have in the past, and enjoyed it, but I'd like everyone to benefit from my work now, equally. By releasing what I do for free, and focusing on projects I can release for free, I show my support for this amazing scene, and willingly put the tools to make awesome music into the hands of musicians regardless of income and means. Sure, I've thought about it, and thank you for suggesting that my work's good enough to warrant paying for, but I'm much prouder to release my work free to the scene, especially the original work. If you want to spend money to help the cause, send it to Native Instruments, without whom my work would have been impossible.

Oh yeah, by the way, do go back and check my GS-1 release; I've added the GS-2 link there as a bonus.

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PASSWORD: magesy

You are the greatest. Keep making awesome music and spread the FM love!


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The Complete Yamaha DS55 for FM8
Every preset of the V50's even rarer little brother, submitted for your FM8 approval.

Do you remember the DS55? Most people don't; it was the more affordable counterpart of the V50, targeted to home users. Instead of the expensive effects, sequencer, disk drive, and PCM drums, the DS55 featured reduced polyphony, automatic left-hand accompaniment function (the hallmark of home-market keyboards everywhere), a non-editable limited arpeggiator, and an internal battery compartment. For a sub-$1000 board (it premiered at $795), it was a pretty sweet little deal, with some of the patches that made the end of Yamaha's FM days so great.

Indeed, twice the number of patches included with the V50, though the V50 had a disk drive for easy loading and saving of alternate presets, making collecting 'em easy.

I've never used one of these, so I can't be 100% sure these are spot-on, but having converted thousands of Yamaha Sysex dumps in the last few months, I've come to learn where conversions tend to go wrong (modulation multipliers and offset multiplers, BC/C1-dependent patches, 100 vs. 127 scale differences, etc.), and I think I've caught every major fixable glitch in these purely by ear and by math. I note that two patches, the "applause" presets, rely upon a hardware limitation of the DAC's in the keyboard, a limitation which FM8 lacks -- and so, you hear them as "blippy" instead of noisy and crackly. The problem is simple: you can't overdrive the virtual DAC without using effects, and it ramps voltage nearly instantly, unlike the DAC's in the source keyboard which can't change voltage as quickly.

In short, FM8's too clean, too fast, too precise. These patches abuse a "glitch" in the DAC, and I'm not able to exploit that with FM8, as it doesn't glitch. I can't reproduce these patches faithfully, so I've offered these presets as-is. The others, however, shouldn't present a problem.

PS: I haven't forgotten my promise to supply the TX81Z megapack, including Yamaha's complete internal library of additional dev patches in TX81Z format -- including unused patches, development versions of patches that later appeared in other synths, and tons of other goodies. The problem is simple: it's almost 2500 patches total (with duplicates -- four different dumps, presented in their entirety, some older versions of patches), and it's taking a LONG time to sort through -- and furthermore, many of these patches were never released, so I have no idea what they sound like, and won't even be able to verify that my reconstructions are correct. I suspect they are -- I'm developing a good sense of where patch conversion goes wrong, lately -- but I'll never be able to confirm it.

Progress? All 2500 converted to FM8, and roughly 1200 are left to pass the "ear test" before being declared "done." I expect to release the TX81Z megapack within a week's time. Keep your eyes out.

In the meantime, check out this little gem of a synth to tide you over. Enjoy. Another Magesy exclusive release for my friends at the greatest audio site online.


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PASSWORD: magesy