While certainly not impossible to decipher (although I had to make educated guesses a couple of times as to how some of the values were bit-encoded into certain bytes) they leave little clues as to in what sequence the aforemented tables should be included into one another.

From Yamaha’s end, it is provided in the form of tables, such as the one shown here. What’s even more problematic is that the documentation is not structured in a completely logical manner. If you’re not in the mood to decipher pages of documentation like this, I’m not going to blame you for not doing it. It’s a six operator FM synth engine with vastly superior architecture than the DX7 – surely it must be able to digest DX7 patches? It has been sitting at the lower rung of my rack for a couple of years now since buying it from a good friend, and haven’t found much use – yet. What about Yamaha’s own SY77?Īs it turns out, I have the module version of the same synth, the TG77. It would be interesting to test the patches on a Kodamo EssenceFM but that will have to wait until I can bribe my friend into lending me his. Obviously software emulations such as Dexed will load up my patches without complaints, but that’s no challenge. Next, I looked into DX7-compatible synths. Such is the case for such obvious targets as the Digitone by Elektron (super-secret classified documentation of System Exclusive format) and even older gear such as the ubiquitous Yamaha TX81Z, which according to the lackluster amount of patches online seem to have been destined to only provide Lately Bass to the world ever since. What other synths could be a prime target for this type of patch creation?Īs it stands, most other synths today either have a too small pool of created (good) patches to learn from and/or the data format has not been made official. While doing this, I also started researching parallel avenues for my program. Once I realized that my code for generating DX7 sounds (see previous entries here and here) was actually working and is indeed able to create interesting and useful sounds – much to my surprise, I might add – it has become a matter of adding more and more features for refining the sounds once they are downloaded to the synthesizer.ĭon’t misunderstand me – the majority of sounds are still useful as-is, but I hate to have to bring them into an editor to fix an output level of 98 or notch up the fine frequency from 1.48 to 1.49 to make things a bit more in tune, so I added a bit of code to enable polishing of sounds that need a tiny bit of care before being truly useful.

Dx7 patch sy77