Yamaha V50, DX-5, TX-7, TX802, Preset Collection for FM8

A MAGESY EXCLUSIVE RELEASE
THE COMPLETE VIRTUAL YAMAHA V50 SYNTHESIZER FOR FM8 (with PCM percussion for Kontakt 2)

Released in 1989, the Yamaha V50 workstation, direct successor to the legendary TX81Z rackmount synth, featured 4 operator, 8 algorithm FM synthesis, 16-note polyphony, multiple built-in effects, an 8-track sequencer with a ninth track featuring PCM rhythm samples, and a built-in disk drive for saving your patches and sequences. It represents the end of the line for Yamaha's FM synths of the Eighties, the end of the phenomenal product family that brought us the DX-7. A miraculous synthesizer...but one that few people had a chance to play with.

It even said "Nice to meet you" when you turned it on. Yes. Really.

Finding data for this synthesizer on the net is tricky. Most of the alleged Sysex dumps you'll find are actually TX81Z patches. The one copy of the V50's ROM that you'll find is in a nonstandard format for an Atari ST patch management package, and it's corrupt to boot.

Your humble narrator didn't like that at all. Sadly, his V50 was lost many years ago, and he couldn't obtain a clean copy of the patch data from it. So what did he do?

He got out his hex editor and his documentation on both Yamaha Sysex data and the file format for that Atari patch manager, pulled out the recordings he made when he had his V50, and painstakingly recreated the Sysex data for all the 96 surviving patches. The four damaged patches he either found ported to the TX81Z and re-ported back to the V50, or rebuilt them from the ground up, with a phone call to a current V50 owner, reading FM synthesizer settings over the phone and comparing the tone reproduced to his recordings.

He also found samples he made, years ago, of those PCM drums.

Presented to you this evening in its entirety is the culmination of months of work: the entire Yamaha V50 patch library and rhythm kit, painstakingly and tediously converted (with conversion glitches fixed) to a format usable by Native Instruments FM8 (the patches) and Kontakt (the drums). You too can now own the full suite of sounds that came with the Yamaha V50.

Astute listeners will notice that a few patches, such as Strings 1 and Metalimba, have some odd faint 'warble' on the highest notes. The FM8 effects are not exactly faithful to the V50's, and are less forgiving of digital noise than the V50's "creamier" DAC's. This is a side effect of the emulation being "more precise" than the synthesizer and cannot, at this time, be helped without compromising the fidelity of the patches themselves.

This has never been released before. I released a preliminary conversion of some of the patches to FM7 some years ago, but this is the entire set, with rhythm kit.

You will need FM8 to use these patches, and Kontakt to use the PCM drumkit.

UPDATE 1.2: The final two reconstructed patches, MellowBrs and FloatBrs, have been rebuilt from Misiqueer's known good ROM dump -- the V50's breath control handling is quite different from FM8's. Two versions of these patches are included, one for folks who plan to use a breath controller, one for folks who don't. As of this moment, all 100 patches are bona fide, confirmed authentic from a known good source. This should be the final release! Enjoy!

UPDATE 1.1: Thanks to the generosity of Musiqueer in providing a known good V50 ROM dump, I am very, very pleased to present a much more faithful 1.1 release of the patch set. This ROM dump had the correct modulation multiplier for the V50, making vibratos more accurate, and damage was found in many more patches than previously suspected. Strings 1 and Metalimba in particular will sound perfectly faithful to form now. (I have included the 'alternate' dump of Strings 1, suspected bad, as well.)

Enjoy, and thank you for being a part of the greatest audio site online. I may be releasing additional patch sets for FM7/FM8 in time, as my newfound knowledge of Yamaha Sysex data will make it easy to pick apart some of the odd files floating around the net. I have plans to release additional factory sets for the classic Yamaha synths, including oddballs like the DX27.

DOWNLOAD NEW VERSION 1.2: RAPIDSHARE

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