DX7 is 40 years old!

[danskeys]

It was iconic.  Most everyone had one. I did not.  I believe my rig was a Korg Poly-61 with a midi retrofit, a Juno-106 and maybe something else.  But I'm just going say this about the DX7: I never liked the sound!  Sorry.  I just didn't.  I liked the D50 and the M1 (I eventually had an M3R--a poor man's M1).  But I never, ever liked the sounds of the DX7.  Even now, with my Nord Stage 4 (and 3 before it), I skip right over all the FM sounds.  Don't know what it is, but that sound isn't my thing!  Anyway, it was quite a trend, and I certainly appreciate the DX7's place in history!

[Anderton]

I think what people don't like about the sound is the lack of a lowpass filter--all bright, all the time. But one very cool aspect of the DX7 was all those sine waves. I think their mission in life was to go through distortion   However, any presets that worked well with distortion sounded boring as hell without it.

 

It's really too bad FM synthesis was such a hassle to program, it could do interesting stuff if you went past the presets and used external processors.

 

[danskeys]

And I should also say that I simply *must* have read something by you, Craig, in Keyboard Magazine about the DX7.  Right?  It's an honor to have my post be next to yours on this topic.  You have no idea how many of your articles I read as a budding teenage keyboardist, and how much respect I have for your knowledge and writings!  Thank you!!

[Anderton]

Just now, danskeys said:

 It's an honor to have my post be next to yours on this topic.  You have no idea how many of your articles I read as a budding teenage keyboardist, and how much respect I have for your knowledge and writings!  Thank you!!

 

Well, people like you are why I'm able to keep doing more research, and share as much of it as possible. Those who read my articles, buy my books, watch my YouTube channel, etc. are essentially my patrons. I'm happy to be able to give something in return!

[Radagast]

After reading the excellent review of the DX-7 in Keyboard Magazine, I started tinkering with programming my DX-7.  I was never impressed with the attempts to imitate analog strings until…I discovered an amazing programming function.  After selecting algorithm 2, I programmed all operators to the same ratio. That game me more or less a sawtooth like harmonic series.  But the feedback on operator 2 needed to be cranked up to match the harmonic richness to carrier 1, that 4,5, and 6 gave to operator carrier 3.  Detuning a bit still didn’t make it sound analog.  Then I discovered the magic parameter called fixed frequency. I set the fixed frequency to zero on carriers 1 and 3.  That’s when the magic happened.  By playing around with that idea I came up with another patch that sounded like the sweep at the beginning of “Tom Sawyer”.  I think I used the pitch envelope for that.  I did a blind test with two guitarist friends who loved Oberheim and analog synths.  In comparing my DX-7 string sound with my Oberheim Xpander string sound, they couldn’t tell the difference.

[David Emm]

I never took to the DX7 because FM was too much of an overload while I was still learning about analog. I bought a CZ-101 to get the same sort of flavors and the DW-8000 covered part of it, like the Taco Bell bell. Between those and 2 Mirages, I had plenty of reach.

 

I took up DEXED and was pleased at the huge variety of sounds, but again, its rare that someone has a grab-it-&-go touch with FM. None of it has seemed worth the work it would take to develop satisfactory facility in using it.

 

Frankly, I'm pleased that physical modeling came along in a viable form, because Chromaphone gives me all the "FM" I really want. It functions like a VA while still handling FM & additive-type sounds, as well as the fluid PM goods.

[Radagast]

In Keyboard Magazine, Wendy Carlos compared the FM of the Synclavier to the additive synthesis of the digital synthesizer she preferred, the Crumar GDS.  She noted that FM produced interesting attacks but then settled into a static waveform.  So when I started tinkering with my DX-7, I approached it like an analog synthesizer.  The envelopes for the carriers were like the envelopes for the VCA.  The envelopes for the modulators were like the envelopes for the VCF.  Increasing the level of a carrier was like increasing the volume in the VCA.  Increasing the level of a modulator was like changing the cutoff frequency of the VCF.

[Reezekeys]

I first encountered Yamaha FM tech before the DX came out. I was in London doing a month-long gig (yea that will never happen again!), and one day ventured into Harrod's (the high-end department store for those who don't know). On one of the floors was this piano-looking instrument that sounded like no other keyboard I ever heard - this was the GS1. I remember a binder with pages of small plastic strips a few inches long and maybe a quarter-inch wide. You inserted this strip into a slot on the right side (it's visible in the photo) and it got sucked in and there was your new sound. IIRC this keyboard was behind a velvet rope and standoffs. Not positive but I think this was 1983.

 

 

[bill bosco]

i still have mine , bought it in '85 or 6 . broke it out last year , it still worked , original battery . i remember being told the batteries were only supposed to 

be good for 10 years or so but they've seen some go past 15 or more . amazingly , my MODX has all my favorite DX7 EPs , including a Rhodes EP which back 

in the '80s was a custom sound i was able to get a hold of for my DX , it's showed up since in the DX card for the Motifs and as a stock patch in both the 

MOXF and the MODX .

[jazzpiano88]

1 hour ago, Reezekeys said:

I first encountered Yamaha FM tech before the DX came out. I was in London doing a month-long gig (yea that will never happen again!), and one day ventured into Harrod's (the high-end department store for those who don't know). On one of the floors was this piano-looking instrument that sounded like no other keyboard I ever heard - this was the GS1. I remember a binder with pages of small plastic strips a few inches long and maybe a quarter-inch wide. You inserted this strip into a slot on the right side (it's visible in the photo) and it got sucked in and there was your new sound. IIRC this keyboard was behind a velvet rope and standoffs. Not positive but I think this was 1983.

 

 

 

Used on the early Yellowjackets and Toto records.   To this day had FM cross modulation algorithm you can't achieve on the Montage or any virtual FM implementation.   I think a few are left in the wild.   Only people like the above or artists like Stevie Wonder could afford (and appreciate) the beast.

[mpn_user7629]

I never had the original keyboard...just TX7 modules.

 

For anyone interested, this is well worth the watch.

 

 

 

[TommyBoy]

4 hours ago, JoJoB3 said:

Well first, the two are completely different boards (Who knows why a sampler was chosen when a synth was desired?)
The Mirage is the more interesting item in 2023.

* But, the Mirage can be the DX whereas the DX can never be the Mirage. A 2 fer!

Yep, your asterisk answers the question for me. I was a 16 year old kid with money saved up from long hot summers working in the fields on the ranch. The Mirage had a bunch of 3.5" diskettes with tons of samples and in my mind I could play any sound I wanted to with it. The DX7, well, a bunch of bells. Of course that morphed into me coughing into a mic and duplicating the Ferris Bueler scene and playing endless repetitions of the Led Zeppelin Whole Lotta Love samples!

[Dave Bryce]

I had a DX7 and a TX7.  I MIDI’d the TX to a JX8P and got really cool stacked sounds out of it.  I seem to remember trying layering the DX and TX and detuning them to try and fatten them up.  Sat the DX and JX8P on my Invisible stand with the TX7 perched on the right side of the 8P’s front panel , and there was my rig for a bunch of the 80s.

 

dB

[Radagast]

6 hours ago, JoJoB3 said:

Well first, the two are completely different boards (Who knows why a sampler was chosen when a synth was desired?)
The Mirage is the more interesting item in 2023.

* But, the Mirage can be the DX whereas the DX can never be the Mirage. A 2 fer!

No it can’t.  The Mirage can take a very short, grungy sample of the DX-7, but will still be missing the expressiveness of the velocity and aftertouch.

[Radagast]

2 hours ago, mpn_user7629 said:

I never had the original keyboard...just TX7 modules.

 

For anyone interested, this is well worth the watch.

 

 

 

Interestingly, even though Allen Organs passed on using FM, they were the first company to market a digital musical instrument in 1971.

[elsongs]

19 hours ago, Paul Woodward said:

Brown Turd PMSL

Not sure that colour combo (brown and green!) would get past the design stage nowadays

On the contrary - aren't forests brown and green? Back in the DX7's day, FM was the best way to reproduce acoustic sounds (in contrast to analog synths). So the color combo was probably intentional to evoke some semblance of nature represented in its stark, spartan design.
 

[elsongs]

I'm a Gen-Xer who first got into synths in the early '80s thanks to new wave music and music videos. It was some Duran Duran video ("Planet Earth" or "Careless Memories," I forgot which) that, after seeing Nick Rhodes playing behind a stack of synthesizers, made me go, "Man, that looks sooooo cool, I wanna play that."

I got a Yamaha Portasound keyboard for Christmas 40 years ago, and within the next year, my parents bought an upright piano and my siblings and I were enrolled in piano lessons from the neighborhood teacher. But only I REALLY wanted to play piano (and 40 years later, I'm the only one in the family who kept playing music).

I remember the very first time I saw a Yamaha DX7. It was the Summer of 1984. The Olympics were in town and Los Angeles was at the center of the world. I would go take the bus to the Hollywood Guitar Center (back then, they were just a local chain in Southern California), and in the original location across Sunset Boulevard from the current flagship store. For some reason the floor model DX7 was tricked out with an olive green-colored lighted LCD screen. I remember playing some of those golden preset sounds which sounded EXACTLY like the songs on the radio. To me, it sounded like magic. I was only 13 years old at the time and I thought "FM Synthesis" meant you can amplify your DX7 on an FM stereo or something (Like I said, I was only 13).

A year later, I watched every hour of Live Aid on TV. Every other band had a Yamaha DX7 onstage. It was everywhere. I could play the lead line of "Axel F" on my little Yamaha Portasound using the Strings preset, but I can't play the percolating bridge part because it's from a Yamaha DX7. I WANTED A DX7. Even more than a girlfriend, lol. It drove me crazy. 

I didn't come from a rich family by any means, but my parents had decent-paying jobs, and though we didn't live luxuriously, I don't recall a time when we were in any dire financial hardship. They knew I was getting more serious playing music and wanted a synthesizer. I think for a time I was deciding between a Roland Juno-106 and a DX7. So for Christmas 1985, I got a Yamaha DX7. I'll never forget that Christmas morning, opening the big DX7 box and the accessories box that had all the pedals and the demo cassette tapes with the keyboardists from Toto playing on it.

In 1986, I joined my first band, played music in public for the first time and met my first girlfriend. AND I owned a DX7. I never felt so complete in my life. I was the only kid in my junior high school who owned a freakin' Yamaha DX7. That did wonders for a teenager's self-esteem.

The DX7 was my main keyboard for years, though when I got my first sampler/workstation after high school (Ensoniq EPS), the DX7 played a more background role. But since it was my only synth for a long time, I actually got good at programming FM sounds. I've made quite a few of my own patches, most of which when I was still in high school. Had I had the ability to do SysEx exports back then, I could've been the teenage Bo Tomlyn (I didn't integrate a MIDI-equipped computer into my setup until 1995). In the early '90s, I did my first internal battery replacement and bought a Grey Matter Response E! expansion board. 

Being my first synth ever, It has huge sentimental value and I will never sell it. Though I don't play it all the time, I still treat it like a beloved classic car. In 2016, I upgraded the LCD to a lighted green LCD (not the same as the one at the Guitar Center in 1984, but at least it's more color-coordinated with the buttons). It continued to work fine, though those front-panel buttons were starting to tear on the sides. In 2017, I managed to score a very rare Yamaha replacement front panel sticker to replace my cracked buttons, and finally installed it in January 2020 (I had to carefully cut boxes in the sticker panel for the sliders, LCD screen and cartridge slot with an Xacto knife). Also in the late 2010s, I bought an Eventide H9 effects pedal as a dedicated effects unit for the DX7. Wow...even the cheesiest pad patch sounds like a million bucks through that thing. 

This Christmas will mark 38 years with my DX7. Still going strong!

[Paul Woodward]

47 minutes ago, elsongs said:

On the contrary - aren't forests brown and green? Back in the DX7's day, FM was the best way to reproduce acoustic sounds (in contrast to analog synths). So the color combo was probably intentional to evoke some semblance of nature represented in its stark, spartan design.
 

If only it were that exciting….

 

[Spider76]

16 hours ago, Dave Ferris said:

Seemingly over night the LA standard combo of Rhodes/ Prophet 5, Jupiter 8, or OB8  became totally irrelevant.

 

Jupiter 8's or OB8's were standard stuff in LA?!? How many billionaire musicians were there at the time?

😯

[Threadslayer]

1 minute ago, Spider76 said:

A Jupiter 8 or OB8 was standard stuff in LA?!? How many billionaire musicians were there at the time?

😯

Word. I must have been doing it wrong.🤔

[ABECK]

35 minutes ago, Spider76 said:

 

Jupiter 8's or OB8's were standard stuff in LA?!? How many billionaire musicians were there at the time?

😯

JP8 was what, about $5k at the time?  That's roughly $15k in today's dollars!  

[Reezekeys]

My mom loaned me the ~$4K I needed to buy my first synth, an 8-voice OBXa.

 

It seems almost de rigeur to pull out our inflation calculators to see the equivalent in today's dollars - so in my case, it's about 13.5K. Maybe I'm weird, but using that equivalency, I could never in my right mind consider spending that much on a synth today. Yet back in 1981, I had no such qualms about the price of the OB - that's just what these new digitally-controlled analog synths cost. And that's another reason the DX7 was revolutionary: it was about half the price of the typical OB or Prophet.

 

This just popped into my brain - didn't the first ad for the DX7 say something like "Digital - Programmable - $1995"? (If I'm right, I've lost fewer brain cells than I think!).

[mauriziodececco]

At the time, not enough money to buy a DX7, or anything else.

I finished my studies, got the first salary in january 1986, and a year (or soà later i bought a TX802, together with a Matrix 1000 and a TX16W sampler, and a master keyboard.
Yes, and an Atari :).

 

Maurizio

[Mididude]

Just a random comment here, I’ve never owned a DX7, but I’m 50 years old, so I’m of the generation that were (roughly) teenagers when that sound was dominating the charts.  I remember going to my aunt’s wedding in circa 1985 and the cover band she & her groom hired had to keyboard player with a DX7.  I thought it looked really neat with its (pastel?) membrane buttons.  Shortly after that, I think I saw one in a music shop and toyed around with it, having no earthly clue what I was doing, of course.  One of my favorite DX7 sounds is that ‘zee-yowng’ patch (with tons of bright harmonic content appearing to be filter-swept or something) in ‘Money for Nothing’ by Dire Straits.  
Also, assuming that this was the keyboard used, the synth bass line from ‘Into the Groove’ by Madonna.  In that list that the O.P. provided a link to, ‘When I Think Of You’ stood out to me.  I remember watching that video on MTV as a kid.  Very neat bass line.  I think that’s why we like the DX7, that bass patch has a ‘heft’ to it… those of you who own an original one, or have a software emulator, might know if they use the same patch in the Mr. Mister tune.  I don’t, but without A/B’ing them otoh I’d guess it might have been the same one used, or tweaked.  I have the book ‘Keyboard (Magazine) presents the best of the 80s’ sitting in a space in my coffee table next to me. I know they have an excerpt from when they interviewed Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and they talked about the DX7 a bit.  

[Paul Woodward]

Was £1299 at launch in the UK, but back then it might as well have been a million to a 13 year old....

[Paul Woodward]

Gotta love a retro ad, and is that a BC2 Breath Controller lurking in the picture??.

 

Weird to think that after all these years, the Yamaha YC range has an 8 operator FM engine that is only presets.....

 

[eric]

Other fun DX7 memories...

 

Bo Tomlyn was a prolific sound creator for the DX7 back in the day and used to have smallish ads in Keyboard Magazine. I remember thinking he could make the DX7 do anything he wanted.

 

When I got my DX7IIFD, there was a company called Sound Source Unlimited that would sell floppy disks with 32 or 64 new sounds in various categories such as "analog greats" or "movie soundtracks" etc. I was on a quest to get all of them...they were about $30 each and in 1987-1988 for a HS kid working at a grocery store for maybe $3.50 per hour (whatever minimum wage happened to be then plus a bit)...it was a stretch to get these disks...yet I ended up with most all of them.

 

When I graduated HS in 1988, my mom took me on a trip to the UK with my grandparents and brother. I sought out music stores with keyboards. I don't remember what the store was called, but I found a shop in London with a couple of DX7IIFDs and their floor models had COMPLETELY DIFFERENT sounds loaded into them. I was kind of floored by the variety of sounds. It was kind of unorthodox at the time, though I finally convinced the keyboard salesperson that he needed to let me take a blank disk and copy these sounds...we finally agreed upon a dollar amount that was equivalent to $50 USD. I still have this disk somewhere (I think I hand wrote "British DX Sounds" on it). I also have copies of most of my Sound Source Unlimited sounds.

 

 

[JoJoB3]

3 hours ago, mauriziodececco said:

At the time, not enough money to buy a DX7, or anything else.

I finished my studies, got the first salary in january 1986, and a year (or soà later i bought a TX802, together with a Matrix 1000 and a TX16W sampler, and a master keyboard.
Yes, and an Atari :).

 

Maurizio

Did you know...
The ATARI is worth more today?

[Outkaster]

I had a DX21 and still have it.  Everyone in the 80's had to have a DX7 though it was so popular back when music stores were music stores..  It flattened the market for organs and Leslie's.

[Paul Woodward]

 Nice potted history of Yamaha synth development

https://europe.yamaha.com/en/products/contents/music_production/synth_40th/history/chapter01/index.html