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Comment by Doctor_Fegg | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much every synthesiser for 15 years had the same two-row LCD interface as the DX7. My first job out of university in 1995 was as assistant editor of Keyboard Review magazine (UK), and the vast majority of synths I reviewed - wonderful beasts from Ensoniq, Roland, Korg, technologically way ahead of the DX7 - had exactly the same bloody awful UI. Akai's S-series samplers, which everyone was using back then, did provide a decent display... but at a price. When someone finally made a sampler affordable by the home market (Ensoniq's ESI-32) it too had a greatly compromised display, though at least four rows rather than two.

I've always suspected this actually influenced the electronic music styles of the time. The 90s were the start of the analogue resurgence. Sure, an 808 or a 303 is a fabulous-sounding beast in itself. But twiddling knobs is just so much more rewarding and responsive than spending hours squinting at a two-line LCD.

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Having made the impossibly un-portable CS80, Yamaha decided to try something different with the DX7 UI.

The DX7 was designed to be a gig-able synth that anyone could throw in a car and set up on their own. It was a brilliant success because you had good-enough epiano and other stock sounds in a package that was far more portable than a real epiano, clav, basic poly, etc.

This was purely a cost/weight issue. The hardware required for one-knob-per-function would have doubled the weight and probably tripled the cost.

E.g. a company called Jellinghaus made a full-sized analog-style programmer and it was bigger than the DX7.

https://www.matrixsynth.com/2008/01/jellinghaus-dx-programme...

People like analog synths because they have a very simple programming model that only makes a relatively small range of sounds, most of which sound good more or less by default. You trade immediacy against sophistication.

The DX7 etc went the other way, which infuriated musicians used to those analog sounds, but created an entire support industry of sound designers and libraries.

If you want a tactile UI now you can create one on an iPad. The surprising thing in 2019 is that synth designers still haven't fully explored touch screen interfaces, and are mostly just recycling ideas from 30 years ago.

Great comment in general but I certainly wouldn't call a piece of glass "tactile". I've been waiting, ever since the first iphone, for a tactile smartphone (one with buttons).

Obviously your meaning was toward "customisable UI", which tablets are. I use one as a daw.

>If you want a tactile UI ...

If you want a tactile UI, get a Yamaha Reface DX[1]!

It's amazing how much fun you can have with an FM synth with a couple of sliders that allow you to change the sound as you play it.

I can write love odes to that machine.

[1]https://usa.yamaha.com/products/music_production/synthesizer...

seconded. Love my reface dx

There's also an important distinction between electronic musicians that enjoy diving into sound design and keyboardists who just want a typical stock sound. Today, most synthesizers and keyboards usually clearly cater to one of these audiences, with analog synths created for the former and workstations like Korg Kronos for former.

However, DX7 works as both – it was both used as a source of very innovative sounds, as well as a simple preset-driven keyboard for many, many pop musicians who seemed to never have used anything but built-in presets.

>People like analog synths because they have a very simple programming model that only makes a relatively small range of sounds, most of which sound good more or less by default. You trade immediacy against sophistication.

Well and they sound completely different.

The UI differences don't come down to number of controls but the fact that most analog designs have a 1:1 relationship with the sound, every knob you turn has a very distinct impact on the sound and usually, applying that to any input generates more or less the same impact on the output. It's extremely intuitive to learn how changing a knob changes the sound.

FM is completely different, where altering simple things like the operator ratios and modulation index have massive changes on the sound and don't create the same effect on different sounds - it's naturally non-intuitive. Most FM wizards get there through tons of experimentation, not through established fundamentals.

Imagine playing a wind instrument and changing your embouchure alters the pitch of the differently depending on what note you finger. That's what programming an FM synth is like.

iPad synths are a dime a dozen these days. Lack of a physical interface is as big a problem on them as with larger synths. They are hardly tactile.

A corollary here is the success of wavetable synths compared to granular, additive, and FM in the softsynth space. Wavetables have the same subtractive model as traditional analogs, and incorporate many of the same features as semi-modular synths. But they are extremely versatile because of how their interface is intuitive even for first time users - it's stupid easy to change the sound, the only additional dimension is the wavetable but that's quick to pick up. Compared to say, granular synths which are possibly the most versatile paradigm, but whose controls are extremely divorced from the timbre of the sound you design.

The first version of Polychord for iPad had a fully-functioning FM synth under the hood, but I ended up disabling it because it didn’t fit with the simplicity of the product. Even providing a nice set of presets to choose from was turning into a time-suck — it really is an art.

> that anyone could throw in a car

I buy broken DX7's and restore them back to 'as good as possible', I've seen some DX7's that still worked but didn't have a lick of paint on them from all the throwing around. They're built like tanks.

Very much so, the build quality is amazing. I sold my late dad's 1983/4 DX7 MK1 in 2014 to someone who is now a pal - it was gigged for something like 20 year, more than once a week and all it needed was a new battery.

Roland perhaps deserve some credit for the JP-8000 which, while sporting a two line display, was also accompanies by knobs, buttons, and sliders to control pretty much everything.

To my ear, it never quite had the smooth richness of sound that, for example, the SH-101 had (manually tweaking the cutoff always seemed to generate some aliasing clicks), but it still gave great tweakability.

The CS1x is a digital synth with analog knobs for parameter control. Plenty of fun and flexibility through trial and error.

http://www.vintagesynth.com/yamaha/cs1x.php

I have one of those! Great device and cost was reasonable at the time. I must dig it out the attic one of these days and hook it up to some modern software synths...

JD800 came out first.

(The lede is a bit buried—I think the UI problems with the DX7 run deeper than the front panel. Skip below.)

There were monstrosities like the PG-1000. Basically, 56 sliders in a separate box which you could plug in to the D-50 (or D-550) to program all of the parameters at once with a physical interface. I think it sucks. I still have my D-550 and I’ve seen the PG-1000s go past at the stores for good prices.

In a short time, synths went from having a handful of parameters to being complete monsters and it took a while for the UI to catch up. The Korg Poly6 from 1981 has 22 knobs, Oberheims aren’t far off, but the DX7 has something on the order of 100 parameters. I think it has 7 envelope generators and each EG is about twice as complicated as an ADSR.

There’s basically two viewpoints on the DX7 on forums, from what I can tell. One viewpoint is that you would do your programming for the DX7 on a computer over MIDI, and with such a setup you could unlock the true potential of the device—or at least tap into the thousands of presets available online. The other viewpoint is that most of the presets online are garbage or duplicates, and you only want a DX7 for the handful of classic presets it had like Full Tines.

I recently dived in a bit deeper. For the JS13K demo competition last month, I wrote an audio synthesis engine in JavaScript that let me write audio programs in Lisp, and this engine could replicate some of the DX7 sounds. I also own a Yamaha TX-802 (basically rack-mount DX7mkII), so the techniques were familiar. I went through the TX-802 library and various presets I found online and dissected them to try and build my own sounds for my JS13K game.

(Skip to here if you only care about UI.)

My conclusion is that the DX7 UI is only part of the problem. FM synth programming is not remotely user-friendly and it won’t be. The problem I found was that it was often very narrow ranges of parameters that would sound good or meet your needs in a particular patch. I spent hours tweaking modulation levels. I would mute one operator chain, tweak modulation and envelopes on the other one, then switch and continue. Changing frequency ratios had an even bigger effect.

This is in contrast to subtractive synthesis, where it’s fairly easy to dial in a frequency cutoff for your filter.

I think the problem here is that once the modulation level gets too high, the level of the fundamental starts dropping, and it happens very quickly. FM modulation levels have a very narrow range from “enough modulation that it sounds interesting” to “too much modulation and it sounds like garbage”.

So my personal opinion is that the DX7 is still gonna be a pain to program even with more knobs. YMMV. I happen to own a TX-802 and programmed my own FM softsynth.

>FM modulation levels have a very narrow range from “enough modulation that it sounds interesting” to “too much modulation and it sounds like garbage”.

Yes, FM programming is surprising in that way.

On some patches, the range of "sounds different, but good" values is larger. On others, a small change, and your glorious soundscape descends into early 90s videogame sound or to metallic screeches crazy fast.

Still, the Reface DX does an admirable job of making FM programming enjoyable and fun. As you said: there's no point in change all of the parameters at once, you end up going operator-by-operator. I think the Reface DX offers a great balance UX-wise.

I love my Arrick analog (modular) synth because it is so easy to just reach out and tweak the sound to set the right timbre.

I believe bringing that flexibility to a digital synth is a good thing. I imagine that there could be ways to create a modular 'control panel' and with the help of an embedded compute (as suggested in the article) provide rapid mirroring to the synth. I am a bit surprised that isn't an 'addon' already :-)

I haven't done it with a DX7, but it's pretty straightforward to map whatever you can to external midi controllers. That solution is not as tightly coupled as this solution, but it works well enough... I have a newere electribe and a midi controller with a bunch of knobs and it's a lot more fun to play when I've mapped out a bunch of CCs. So, like the "addon" is midi, but it's just a lot of work to setup maps in certain sitations, and the controllers usually don't know where things might already be set in the patch on a device.

I agree that modular are much more rewarding as you really can just tweak knobs (or have the machine tweak its own knobs in stragne ways)... that's really what I prefer.

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