Kevin Boone writes about the Yamaha DX7, which changed everything when it turned up in the mid-1980s: "the 'Electric Piano 1' preset alone appeared in over 60% of album releases of 1986." It was serious professional performance equipment, a "huge, uncompromising lump of ironwork" designed to be thrown into the back of a van. And it brought digital polyphony to the masters and the masses alike.
The frequency modulator components in the DX7 were called operators. For each of the sixteen notes that the instrument could play polyphonically, there were six of these operators, making 96 in all. The DX7 could combine the operators in many different ways, with the output of one feeding the inputs of others. These arrangements of operators were known as 'algorithms'. The standard algorithms were shown on the top of the DX7's cabinet, as you can see in the photo below. … As a result, the DX7 could produce everything from smooth, organ-like sounds, to abrasive, ringing electronic sounds that we had never heard before.
It exponentially expanded its own market: Yamaha sold ten times as many of these as Moog sold minis up to that point. That they were incredibly hard to program might have conversely helped define it as a distinctive instrument, because everyone just stuck with the presets.
What most people did – certainly what I did – was to fiddle with the settings more-or-less at random, and then store any configuration that sounded good. You could give the sound configuration a name, which would have been handy, if anybody had the patience to enter a name using the horrible membrane keypad. You could save your sound configurations to a memory cartridge, which meant that you could use somebody else's DX7 – perhaps one in a recording studio – with your own settings. I certainly remember trading DX7 cartridges with other keyboard players, back in the day.
One was still lurking at my secondary school in the mid-1990s, a £1,495 investment paying dividends day in, day out for more than a decade.
They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard [Kevin Boone]
