Hello and welcome to the Sound On Sound podcast channel about electronic music and all things synth.  I'm Rob Puricelli. In May of 1983, the world of synthesizers and electronic music as we knew it would change forever. Dramatic words may be, but nobody can dispute that for better or worse, things were never the same again. 

I am, of course, talking about the launch of the Yamaha DX7.

Two decades after Dr. John Chowning discovered the phenomenon of FM synthesis, almost half of which was spent by Yamaha trying to make the process manageable, the DX7 arrived and gave musicians a whole new sonic palette and a first glimpse of the universal connectivity that also debuted that year, MIDI. 

In honour of this occasion, I set out to gather a group of people together, without whom the  DX7 may never have existed or sounded so revolutionary, in order to look back on the impact this synthesizer had on the world and, not least, their own lives.  To this end, one very special Saturday, November of 2023,  I was able to speak with Dave Bristow and Gary Luenberger, sound designers for the original DX7, Manny Fernandez who has worked on all Yamaha's FM projects from the Mark II DX7 through to today's Montage M series. 

And Dr. John Chowning himself.  Over the course of a few hours, these gentlemen regaled me with tales and stories of how they made the DX7 sing, and why, to this day, it remains a very special instrument to them.  Here is a sonic document. of that wonderful day.  My first question is to, to all of you. I'm going to go to each one of you in turn, and I'll start with you, Dr.

Chowning, if I may. What was your first experience of the DX7?  So first of all, I'm not Dr. Chowning. I'm John. Okay.  Duly noted, sir. Yeah. So my wife and I, I went to a local lounge in Palo Alto  and to have a beer and the pianist whom we had known for, you know, a few years,  uh, had a grand piano and he beckoned us over  and he said, look what I have and he had on top of his grand piano a DX7  and I said, wow.

You know, I'd heard about it, but I'd never seen it. And, uh, then he played a few examples, and  I recognized a little bit.  But, uh, I always pay tribute to the fact that the DX7 really is due to the, about a hundred really, really good engineers at Yamaha. They took the license from Stanford in 19, 1972, I think. 

And over that period of years, I visited a number of times and worked with them,  giving them what I knew about the theory of FM and helping them. But I never saw the DX7. So the thing is, the DX7, all the operators, the forms, the stacks,  and that was all based upon these really good engineers that you all know about.

And, uh, and then David and Gary.  So they're the team that I recognize as being the origins of the DX7 to whom we must pay tribute. So my hat's off now to both of them and the team of engineers who never,  never recognized the individuals. That's a policy, a policy of Yamaha.  The individuals, it's all a team effort and no one gets recognized. 

Thank you. Uh, thank you for that. Um, let's move to Gary. Um, what was your very first experience of the DX7? How do you remember that? I got a call  and I was asked to go down and see John at Stanford.  And I think John was a Gordon Getty or somebody,  but I came down to The old karma  and came into a room and you had the big programmer  and I remember sitting down and saying, Hey, John, where's the envelope and where's the filter and all that kind of stuff? 

And you said, Nope, this is digital. So you have to use a modulator and a carrier. And I said, I don't know what you're talking about.  And so, I said, just show me where the knob is and how you turn it up or down. So I started trying to figure it out, as Dave well knows.  And all I could do was use my ears at the time. 

So I went down to, believe it or not, um, I think it was Burbank. So I went into a little room with Hirakata, the engineer, and the GS 1, and Dave remembers the big programmer.  And I sat down, and there were four little boxes, and I just turned a few knobs, and I said, Wow, if I put all these sine waves together, I can make a good Hammond organ.

So I made a Hammond organ.  And then I said, Oh, if I put two of them together,  and detune it, I can make a really nice electric piano sound.  And then if I take the two top ones and turn it up to some high frequency, just by ear, not by math,  I can hear maybe a time sound.  So I started hitting the keyboard and I heard the little Fender Rhodes time.

Then I said, Oh, if I go to the next one, I can hit a little thing and make a, Dave would call it, we called it stuff, a keyboard knocking sound.  And so I played it and there was the electric piano  and I have a little magazine here from Keyboard and it says Meet the factory programmers David Bristow and Gary Luenberger  And then it says, Gary Luenberger created the electric piano sound for the DX7, the most overused sound in the history of music. 

And it was actually used on the TV show Doogie Howser, and I said, Oh, that's my legacy.  Awesome. Um. Dave, what was your first experience with the DX7? How did you come across it?  Well, it was a bit blurry, really, um,  because, I mean, this was all going on.  I'm working in Europe at the end of the end of the 70s. 

I was traveling around Europe demonstrating. CS 80s and,  you know, the, the big old Yamaha synths and then I think it was in 1980,  I got the call to Japan  as a sort of tame European rock and whatever musician, you know, that's where I met Gary.  I was introduced to the, uh, GS 1 and there was a Japanese demonstrator there, a gentleman called Ohama san  and he said, I'm going to play you some presets on the, on the GS 1.

So we're all sitting in this room. And Ohama plays,  sounds like a harpsichord and I thought, Oh, that's very pretty. And then he says, okay, now preset number two and  okay, another harpsichord, slightly different preset number three, another harpsichord, 16 harpsichords  all the way, all sounding slightly different.

And I can remember I was horrified. I was horrified. I, I got very cross because I was  into the CSAT.  And the CS 80 is a beautiful synthesizer. I mean, it's got the most sophisticated after touch and gestural input from, for all of that stuff. The glide ribbon individual, proper individual after touch a little sort of lunchbox place with extra memories in it.

And, and so I told the guys, I told the, our Japanese hosts. And Gary is nudging me all of this time saying it will be alright Dave, it will be alright, it can do much more, you're not hearing everything, and I'm saying no, no, no, it's terrible,  I can do 10 times as much on the CS80, and I said so,  there was a pause in the meeting, next thing, 4 engineers come stumbling through the door carrying a CS80. 

And I'm now expected to do the stuff on the CS80 that I've been talking about, you know. Anyway, that was, that was my first experience of FM. Uh, and, uh, needless to say, it all worked out fine. I came to my senses. I, you know, I heard other stuff.  And at the end of that trip, by the time everyone had gone home and the few of us, there was a few of us from Europe, some manager guys from Kemble and Yamaha Europa. 

Wow, they went off for a, you know, a couple of days in Tokyo. I stayed in the, I stayed in the factory and I'm sitting cross legged in the studio with, um,  probably Yamada san, I don't know who it would have,  uh, Endo  san. Yeah, and oh  yeah, and Carter san, of course, was there.  You know, diving into this,  the thing that Gary had got and essentially going through the experience that Gary had had, uh, with the, with the first GS1, which was essentially to see these,  these operators like Gary, I knew nothing, John Chowning, who's now is a real So A real person and a real, and a real friend was just a name. 

Uh, you know, I thought, Oh, it might be nice to meet him. It might, it might not, you can never tell with these academics, you know, but, but I didn't know anything about him. I knew nothing about FM,  but I knew what, I knew what brass sounded like, but by my ears, I knew what flute sounded like and strings and all the other things.

I've been  listening to sound since I was a tiny, tiny boy, you know, I had tape recorders and played with him and all the rest of it. But that was my first experience and it was, it was not a good one. I nearly blew it. 

Sounds incredible. Um, and Manny, finally to you, um, what was your first encounter with the, the original DX7?  So, um, interesting. I'm going to do a little context to what Dave and Dave and Gary are saying. My first experience with an FM instrument. Uh, was in college when I made the track from UC Davis up to a, uh, little music store on Market Street in San Francisco.

And, uh, uh, there's this thing called the GS 1 sitting behind the CS 80.  And the, uh, owner of that shop let people just do anything they wanted on their synthesizers at that time. Thank you, Gary. And so I just plunked around that as just a As a, uh, you know, very young, uh, white eyed college student thinking, wow, that's a really cool, different timbre, timbre space.

So my first  exposure to the X seven was through those famous magazine ads, the dual page centerfold of keyboard magazine. And then of course the, Flexi disc  of the experience is about to begin or whatever the terminology was that. And, you know, dutifully putting that on my turntable with a penny to, yep.

Do you keep it, uh, keep it from spinning? It was like. Hearing that, and of course the, uh, They also was a cassette tape version of that, that was distributed, which I still have. And that's my first sonic encounter with it. Uh, my first physical encounter with it was not, um, till much later when I was able to see one in a recording studio.

Um, but I wasn't able to touch it. And then, fortunately, I was able to actually acquire one. And my personal DX7 was my first hands on experience with it. And that was late 80, late 83.  And, uh, I was blown away by the work that, uh, was done in the presets. I had, uh, Dr. Chowning's, uh, original paper pulled from the university library, and I had that out, and I was going through every single preset, looking at all the relationships, looking at that paper, going back and forth, because at that time I was still kind of a math nerd, thinking I'm gonna figure out how this works, because, yep, it's not a filter, yes, it doesn't have a waveform control directly, and, um, I just Like they ended up doing absolutely you train your ear to hear what it does.

Yeah. Thank you, John if I can come back to you  once you Familiarized yourself with the DX of once you'd maybe had a bit of time with it.  Did it actually? Epitomize what you had in mind for an FM synthesizer After you had, you know, discovered the principle and then, you know, realized that this could potentially be a musical instrument of some kind.

Did the DX7 embody that or did you feel it had missed the mark or exceeded the mark even?  Well, it included what I had imagined,  but it far exceeded what I thought would  be useful. For example, the four stocked operators  and, uh, where you have a  An operator modulating an operator, modulating an operator, modulating the carrier.

I mean, that  was something that I had never imagined to be useful.  And, uh, but in fact it was.  The thing that, the number of sideband components, let's say partials, that resulted from that combination, if  they were not all related to  simple integers, or the same integers, was an astronomical number. It's, it's quite incredible.

It was like a,  you, millions of partials would result.  And if you change the,  uh, one of the parameters in the top oscillator, you'd enter up a wholly different timbre space. So I never imagined that. And that was really quite a surprise that it could be  so useful. And, uh,  I believe that probably not many people really understood what was happening, but it put them into a space that was  quite different.

And I think most people took patches that they, let's say, what do we call them, algorithms that had already been programmed and they changed the number to, and made it their own. And that's how it worked. I mean, I.  That was the wonder of the DX7. You had this little cartridge. It could, you could send it from Paris to Singapore.

Somebody in Singapore make a couple  changes and create a holy new sound, send it back to Paris. And it entered into somebody else's book, all because it was digital. The fact that things were exactly reproducible from, from,  you know, any point in, in the whole system  and unlike the world of analog synthesizers.

So that was a very important attribute and, uh, but I'll say the thing that most struck me about the DX7  is until the DX7,  To have a,  a system  that, uh, would produce complex sounds that, again, that were in the digital domain was a question of having a huge multi million dollar facility like at Stanford or other university, usually university or Bell Labs, institutional context.

And with a little computer like an Atari or a Mac or a little early.  Apple, Apple,  and the 2, 000 DX7,  you had a  very, very powerful workspace. A digital workstation.  So it democratized  computer music, or from my point of view. All of a sudden, now anyone on earth, even a kid could somewhere in China could save up his money and, and get a DX7 through the underground, or however they do things then.

And, uh, and have a really powerful system. Yeah. That was important. Absolutely. Um, you mentioned the, the stacking of the operators. I believe that the, the feedback loop that, um, that we experienced in there, that was a design of, of the Yamaha engineers. Were you equally impressed by, by what that did and what that added to the way that FM sounds?

Yeah, that was very important.  Uh, a very important contribution. I mean, we did the same thing in a different way by modulating the modulator to get complex, uh,  modulating waves. But that was a very simple direct and easily implemented.  It was ingenious, the guy who did that. I forget his name, but he was, it was really quite a breakthrough, I think.

And his, the patent on that is a, is a,  an embodiment of academic, of a good academic paper. Um, you alluded to the fact that Um, sounds could be stored on a cartridge and then sent anywhere around the world or, you know, swapped between friends and fellow users. And that of course is what, uh, our other three guests today kind of built, um, a substantial part of their career on is creating sounds that could be then stored on cartridges and distributed globally.

And it really was the first synthesizer that had that ability to create and store and move cartridges. Presets around an industry, which now is everywhere is a multi million, if not billion dollar industry.  I just wondered if I could start with Dave first on this one. Was it as revolutionary as we think it was?

Yeah,  you have to remember that the DX7 itself, you know, you asked Gary and I about our first  encounters, but really they were encounters with FM.  Okay, we saw the DX7 when it started to come out, right, from about 82, you'd start seeing models, we'd see models in the factory strapped to huge breadboards, of course, but nonetheless, the case looking like, uh, well, I think it was a DX4, wasn't it, Gary, that they called it, first of all, you know, sort of looking like what we know as DX7s. 

And  for programs out there, and a lot of people ask me, you know, how did you learn to program FM? I think in all fairness, and I'm interested to see if Gary agrees with me,  we had at least two years of working with two operator FM.  We swallowed that, you know, bit by bit and gradually learned what two operators did. 

I think we learned in our heads everything that John had  sort of, you know, discovered and worked with. I, you know, the core of what FM was, we learned exactly how it sounded like, and I think after two years. As Gary said, I could, you know, I, I could tell you how to make pretty much any instrument out of  two,  two operators, given the frequency ratio and the modulation index, just those two parameters could generate pretty much any waveform  type, type sound.

So we were ready, I think, when the DXM came out to explore,  you know, the extra algorithms and stuff that the DXM, you know, the DXM really rounded out.  It  gave you all the bits  you didn't get with simple FM. It was also a synthesizer that had a MIDI plug on the back.  You can't,  that was big. There was, there was the DX seven.

And I think it was the, the profit.  Was it the 6th? Prophet 6th? Anyway, I can remember  an early release of the DX7 and this thing in Paris. I remember showing a bunch of European musicians, and now you can connect two synthesizers together. Look, I can play a chord on this one, and we can hear the sound of that one.

And everybody thought it was amazing.  You know, so that was associated with the DX7.  As you said,  memories and voices became a part of it.  And not only memories and voices, but you could name them. Gary, how many characters were in the LCD  display of the DX7?  Was it seven? Um,  yeah, maybe seven. Yeah. Seven. Like, you know, brass one, brass two, I mean E piano.

Yep. Slap  face. EE piano. One e, piano two. Yeah. We used to put our initials in.  Yes. And, and you know, when you, when people saw that, I noticed when I, when I was, you know, post introduction when I'm like touring around the world. thing.  People would go off into a corner secretly and they type their name in, you know, to see if it could, and then they, then they type rude words or something,  if there was any censorship. 

And then they  start typing up fancy names for things. And then they come back down to brass one, brass two, piano one, piano two. But I, I, but I know it's a silly little thing, but I think that was important to be able to, to be able to name these sounds. To own them and it, it, it was the start of content, you know, the big content industry.

You had one called Dinklebombs, if we're dead for a second. Yeah, we had all sorts of  I, you know, I, I, I hesitate to say,  I'm going to keep my mouth shut. Just,  it's like that scene from the Don Lewis movie where he's talking about a patch called in and out. And he says, well, it wasn't burgers. You know, it was,  it was some amusing things in there.

Um, Gary, um, what was your experience in terms of, you know, designing these presets and thinking about how. They could now be just released on, you know, to the world and you could, you could maybe, you know, or you could, um, start a new business. Well, I'll tell you the first experience I had with the DX9,  actually,  it came to my store in San Francisco. 

And, uh, if Manny came to the store, I had a balcony upstairs.  And my wife worked at the store. So I had the DX9, and I said, Carol, there's 32  algorithms.  And I said, I cannot wait to turn this thing on. I went into my office, and the plug was trailing behind me. And it went under the door, and the DX9 hit the floor, and broke into about 500 pieces. 

So, I went down the street to Radio Shack and brought  glued it back together  and I went home and I started making sounds and then  I've got a QX1 and the TX816 and I turned on Dave Grusin and we started  to make SANE elsewhere.  But in Japan, I remember when I met Dave,  we sat down at a GS1 and Dave was showing me the Hammond organs.

And then Dave said, Oh, I have a feedback loop. So now I can make brass. Do you remember Dave? And you made a great brass sound on the GS1.  So Dave and I were in Japan. We had guys from Germany. Australia, a guy from Canada, Peter Rochon and me and Dave,  and they came in and we had all these beautiful worksheets and the Japanese had loved colored pens.

So we were sitting there saying,  let's listen to all the sounds. And do you remember, Dave, we listened to the Japanese sounds  and they were all very thin and we didn't want to hurt their feelings  because the strings sounded like mosquitoes buzzing around in the room.  And, uh, you know, Germans had all the accordion sounds and the Australians drank a lot of beer. 

And so we went around  all of these auditioning, all of these sounds. And at the end of the day, I remember  they let Peter go back to Canada and the Germans went back and the Australians went back. So it was just me and Dave in a room  and the two of us were left to our own devices with the DX7. And I think we started out and they said, please make 32 sounds for the little cartridge.

Remember Dave, all the questions on a DX7, load, are you sure, change your mind,  change your mind, load, are you sure?  And so, they said, well maybe 64, and then I think, what was the final number Dave, was it 100? 128. Oh, I remember that meeting, Gary,  but the way I, the way I remember it was that  we knew that this meeting was coming up and we'd had some, some preparation time because I remember trying to get, put a call through to you in, in, in the States to say, Gary, have you, we were each supposed to make 16 voices for the DX seven, something like that. 

And I remember calling, speaking to Gary and saying, Gary, are you okay? Have you got your voices? And he was Yeah. I don't know. I think he got help from, I don't know, Manny, if you've made some at that stage.  Um, before it was before me, maybe it was both Tomlin or some of them or Carl Spangler. But there  was a couple of extra voices that Gary had, but he said, they said, he said, Dave, we're good.

He said, I've got about 24 voices. And I said, Oh, well, that's good. I've managed to put about 18 or so together, you know, and I'm happy with 16 of them. We're good for the 32.  And I can remember that meeting up in Japan, sitting around the table, you know, and the Japanese, they're so polite. You know, they sit down.

Oh, good, good, right. Good, right. Yes. Oh, good. Um, one, one small change, very small change, you know. Oh, yeah. What's that? Oh, we want 128 voices, please.  Been decided. Oh, really? When do you need them? Uh, day after tomorrow?  Because it was that week, right? We were, the meeting was on the Monday and by Friday morning, we were talking.

It had to be done. I can remember one of those, you know, one of those sessions when we were working on the voices together, I remember saying, I can't think of 128.  Yeah. You know,  there's hang on, there's guitar, piano, trumpet, that's three, oboe or clarinet. Oh yeah, that's, you know, we will literally go through like that.

And I remember saying to Gary, Gary, what else is the plucked? Let's go through the plucked instruments. And he says, chickens. 

That would have been a cool sound. Um, Manny, you came into the, the sound design process a little after these two guys. Um, tell us the story about how you got involved, um, with that. Cause it's quite an interesting tale. Well, so originally, um,  first of all, I want to  expound on something that was said prior  the stacking and the interactions of the operators  could give you these wonderful complex timbres, right?

That Dr. Channing never envisioned. But the thing that's just so cool about the synthesis system is that  simple changes  affect those wonderful things. And that's the thing I learned about deconstructing the voices of Dave and Gary in the DX7. When you pull them apart, it's like  Wow, that sound is great,  but the structure actually isn't that complicated because so few parameters have such a great change over the sound at the end.

Just, it's just the ratio, the index, and where they're interacting in those algorithms, right? So, I thought that was just really cool that you had so much power with a very small parameter space.  If you were trying to do anything like that in a, um, you know, pre that, like Dr. Channing said, you'd have to have some massive computer system, or you'd have to have, you know, racks of analog gear where  You would even only be able to do a fraction of that So that's what really drew me to it.

So to answer the question, so I just started doing  Explorations on making patches, because, as I've told you before, very close friends with a, uh, renowned L. A. session musician, and I used to do sounds for him and whatnot, um, and so the first encounter in doing some third party patch support was I used to do work for Bo Tomlin, so I met Bo through those contacts, did a couple of little things, um, and he, you know, released some of that, because Keyclick, which was his company, was like probably the first third party software, um, soundware, uh, place out there because the DX7 had all this digital data and you could load it in via SysX in addition to the cartridges.

And so many people were, um, Unfortunately intimidated by making their own sounds that they just started buying sounds.  So for a long time just under the radar I just made sounds for various people and  That morphed into over the lifespan of the instrument  on how other Technology started coming into the MI business.

And so the DX7, you know, was king of the hill for such a long period of time.  And then it was getting supplanted by other synthesizers that had more modern features, like pieces of sample playback, built in effects, and all that. And so,  basically, um,  I got involved with both Yamaha and a third party business SoundSource because I created copies of other instruments in the DX7 when it was starting to fall out of favor. 

And so, I want to say something funny because Gary was talking about E piano, uh, being the most over, uh, used sound. I share something very similar in a totally random way.  My SoundSource sound set  It was the sounds that Tim Carlton used for the infamous Cisco Hold music.  So if you've ever been on Hold and heard that Cisco default music that everybody hears with a rolling drum machine going, ka ka ka chicka chicka chicka chicka chicka chicka chicka That's my sound set on there, just random. 

So it's just like, the DX is everywhere. But anyway, so, yeah, so that's what it was. That's how I got started with SoundSource Unlimited, and of course, at the time, Parallel doing all the factory work for Yamaha. Yeah,  because it is a thing, isn't it? When, when we listen to music, especially if we're close to particular instance, we can hear those, uh, those preset sounds because we, we, we recognize them being those instrument owners, but I guess for the DX seven being  what it was for so many years, the biggest selling synthesizer in the world. 

You must have everywhere you went, you must have been hearing your own sounds being used, especially you, Gary, with a piano one that you know that infamous yet beautiful instrument, which still gives me goosebumps today if I hear  that on in isolation, it still makes me feel like I did when I first heard it.

in 83, 84. It's a magical sound in my opinion, even though many people will ridicule it, you know, usually, you know, with tongue in cheek. How does it feel to have created that one sound that is so revered and equally disliked?  Well, if Dave and I got royalties for the sounds we created, we'd be in the Bahamas right now.

Absolutely. You know, but it was a labor of love.  You know, so Dave and I in Japan, you know, we just sat there for hours saying,  how can we make a sound that will inspire musicians?  And I remember clearly going down to Sherman Oaks, California,  and there was David Page and Steve O'Carroll at TOTEM.  And I sat down with David and he had a nine foot Baldwin grand with a midi interface.

And he said, I'm writing a song. And I said, where did you come from? And he said, I came from the library. And I said, what are you reading? And he said, Oh, about the starving people in Africa. And I said, Oh, great. So he sat down with this piano and I had two DX sevens hooked up and he started playing the Africa riff. 

And he said, Oh my God, there's something wrong with the piano. They put contacts under the keys. So it changed the touch of the piano.  And I said, no worries. Next time I go to Japan, I said, can you guys make a piano with the MIDI interface, which I still have in my. House here, the midi grand piano.  When Dave and I were creating these sounds, David made a great banjo sound. 

So we had all of our sounds together. And then Dave and I sat down, all the engineers were in a circle  and we started playing and Dave was doing this dueling banjo. little thing. And what I remember, Dave, clearly is as we went through all the sounds,  the engineers heard for the first time  their efforts had turned into music. 

And they all had little tears running down their cheeks as we played.  Whilst we're on the subject of patch design, um, I wanted to ask you all, because I think you all came into contact with Don Lewis, um, I wanted to ask you all about his influence and input, um, and understanding as well of the system. He got it very quickly.

I get, you know, like you guys did.  His brain was already in that space and I think he'd already, you know, Read lots of papers that John and colleagues had written on the subject. Um, just wondered if, you know, you could tell me a little bit about your experiences with, with Don Lewis. Well, my first experience, Don taught the DX7 how to talk. 

He had four sounds. One, two, three, four.  So I went to the Hungry Tiger in San Francisco, where Don played. And he had the big Hammond Leo.  And he was at a Roland Echoplex in a Vaux Quarter.  And he was singing, Let's Go Get Stoned.  And when he talked into the microphone, he had all the gospel choirs.  So I called John Gatz at Yamaha, and I said, You have to come to the Hungry Tiger.

And hear this guy play. So all the Yamaha people came up to San Francisco and we went in and we heard Don playing this music  and it was an instant love affair, you know? So I said, you have to hire Don  to do some sounds. And then Don and I were fortunate enough to go on a tour around the country together, and that's when I did St.

Elsewhere and Don did this big symphony orchestra,  but, um. Don  was just an amazing person. I always call him the Bill Cosby of the music business 'cause he had such a wonderful sense of humor. Amazing. Dave, did you encounter Don at all? First time I met, I only, I only met Don as a, as a, as a friend. You know, on those occasions that I went over to San Francisco, visit Gary,  so I hardly knew him.

I, I, when I say I hardly knew him, he is one of those people that.  He was always there when I went, uh, when I went to San Francisco, but he, but that wasn't that often,  you know, but I remember it very, very well, of course.  Um, John, I've, I've seen your, uh, appearance in the Don Lewis movie, you know, fantastic movie that Ned, uh, and Julie produced together.

Um, and you, you speak quite eloquently of Don. What were your memories of the man?  Well, you know, I met Don Lewis when he was working for, uh,  Hammond Organ.  When Stanford decided to license this,  this technology when it was  nowhere near real time back in 1972,  uh,  they, obviously, the Office of Technology Licensing,  contacted the, all the known,  uh, music instrument companies, Hammond and Wurlitzer, et cetera. 

And, uh, so Hammond sent Don Lewis  to evaluate the sounds.  So I played him. tapes of the sounds I had made on this big systems computer because it was not real time. You know, I took sometimes hours to produce, uh, two minutes of sounds because it was a time shared system, et cetera, et cetera. Any case, he really was kind of knocked out by the, by the sounds and I also played him some spatialization stuff that we had going and,  and, uh,  So then, I guess maybe  a few years later I saw, I saw him again  at the Hungry Tiger  and then he came and took a summer workshop. 

He spent, uh, maybe,  Two weeks  in a  commuting, he and his wife, Julie. In the early morning, we worked like from five until nine, when the funded researchers came in at the old AI lab,  and then we had to stop. So after a couple weeks of the summer workshop,  Julie Asked him to play what he had done and he made these little kind of  crazy little tune sounds that were hardly impressive  and She said that's all you have after all this time all these hours getting up and commuting every day  and Unimpressed, but he had enjoyed this this experience and enormously just working on Because a lot of it was just dealing with system, how to do anything on the computer and getting through the system.

Uh,  but that was my,  kind of my contact with Don on a more substantial level.  But he was a beautiful person. I mean, uh,  And he had this kind of,  I think he did the timpani, didn't he, Gary and David? The timpani, when he, in its range, was amazing to me. I couldn't, because I'm a timpanist.  But he had managed somehow to do this.

It was  astonishing, didn't he? Yeah, I think Dave, Dave made the timpani. Yeah, that was fun. Do you remember when we went to ear cam? Oh, man, we had such fun at ear cam. Yeah, so I mean, I mean, I mean, yeah, by the way, that's, that's where I really met John, wasn't it? John was on sabbatical,  he was going to write, I think, a very serious book on computer music, and we ended up writing a sort of, uh, More of a popular book for  me because the DX seven would became so popular.

Yeah. And that, and John is where I learned, I have to say from John, not only at FM, I was able to backfill my understanding of how FM worked, which I have to say,  as many will probably agree with this, it's a much easier way of putting it together. If you have to put,  you know, if you want to program FM and you start by  reading a book on FM.

Good luck, you know,  but, but the other way around, you know, filling in the knowledge backwards make, you know, makes a lot of sense. But John taught me about acoustics,  you know, everything about sound, everything I wanted to know about sound. It was a wonderful time with John. Yeah, it was very rich. And for me as well.

Oh my God. Yeah. Remember Dave, we went to Yca  and we walked into a room and it was John and Maureen and I think David Weel  and Yeah. Yeah. Dave. Yeah.  Ty, they're all we, yeah. Yeah. And we And Ligety was there. Yeah. So were you were in the room.  Legett. Legett. Legett, yeah. George, Ty,  yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. So do you remember they said. 

We want to have this meeting, but Gary Loomberg is from America. He doesn't speak French, so we have to ask him to leave. And Dave said, no, Gary gets to stay.  And Ligeti came in, and we met him, John.  And he said, I was just on a train coming from Italy, and I was reading Keyboard Magazine, and there's an article by Dave and Gary, and it said, we created the sounds.

using our ears, not math.  And he said, I want to thank you guys, you know, for  letting us know that music comes from the heart, not from the mouth. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, this book had a.  A lot of importance. And there's a, I have one funny story about the book. 

When was it published, Dave? 85.  84, 85. Well, no, it must have been 85, because we, that 85 was when you had your sabbatical. Yeah. So when I went back to Stanford, uh, I was asked to go to LA and give a  talk about FM. The book had, was, had been published, and there was maybe, uh, you know, a room of about a hundred guys, mostly.

And, uh,  So, there were all these questions, I explained basically the theory, how for all the complexity of the theory, there are no Bessel functions anywhere near the computer or the DX7, it's just what we need to explain how it works. And, uh, you know, went through all of this, and then there was some guy in the back with an attitude, and he said, sort of challenging me, he said, okay, Dr.

Chowning,  how do you  If you set the modulating frequency to 1 Hz, the carrier frequency of 1 Hz, and  etc., all in a stack.  And I said,  uh, well, what did it sound like? Something like this? Ridu, ridu. He said, yeah, something like that. I said, did you let it run for a while? And he said, no. I said, well, you should have. 

It goes like this. Read. Read a book. Read a book. Read a book. Read a book. Read a book. Read the book. Read the book. Read the book. Read the book. Read the book. Read the book,  . Oh, that's great. That's great. Um,  I know. Gary and Dave, Dave, especially being a being a Brit, I remember seeing your face in all the magazines and I've spoken to many people who attended demonstrations that you did.

And Gary, am I correct to say that you would you were doing demonstrations around the country? I want to know what did those people in the audience feel? What did they tell you about, you know, how the, the impact of this instrument that had, you know, taken over from everything, you know, it, it, it literally, you know, ended.

The life of analog synthesis for a number of years. And here was this instrument doing all these amazing new and previously unheard of sounds. What was the reaction of people on the ground when you were demonstrating this stuff? I started in my store.  I remember Yamaha sent me a CS80  and I took it home.

And I played the presets, and Dave remembers this, they were not very good.  So I set out to start modifying the CS 80 presets. And so I made, I made an organ sound and a string sound.  And I had a technician at my store that could actually go in and change all the little capacitors and put my sounds into the buttons of the CS 80. 

And so I had a custom made CS 80, and Yamaha called one day and said,  Why do you sell more CS80s and CS60s and 50s than anybody in the world? And I said, well, I created my own sounds. And they said,  would you like to do a demonstration around the country for Yamaha dealers? And that was my first introduction to being able to travel. 

Now, Dave and I did the DX7  in my store. I remember the first DX7s came in  and they were 1995.  If you can believe a keyboard. For  1995,  and we had a guest book in our store,  and the way it worked was if you wanted a DX7, I got 40 a month shipped to me from Yamaha,  and we had a little book, and it was absolutely a system of honesty,  so 40  DX7s would come in, and we would call everybody on the list, so I'd call,  this is Stevie Wonder, your DX7's in, do you want it today, and he'd go, yes. 

And we go, so, and the next person would say, Oh, this is John to John Ching. Do you have a DX seven? No, I don't have enough money today. Sorry, John. Cross 'em off the list.  . And we did that for the whole year and we sold, you know, 40 DX sevens a month. It was an amazing time,  but when we, when I remember what Dave and I introduced it at the Nam. 

The reaction of the audience was like stellar. You know, people were just  absolutely amazed. And Dave and I would leave each demonstration and we could not get enough time by ourselves. We, you know, we were trying to talk and everybody would come out and corner us and say, how did you create the French horn?

And Dave, how did you create the aftertouch on the harpsichord?  You know, I think what  I can, I can sum up your original question, Rob, what was, what was the reaction?  I think the reaction was they went out and bought one. Yeah. Yeah. I've never seen that, you know, I've been demonstrating  Is it I can remember doing CSAT demonstrations and that was fun  But you know and I'd travel around the UK and and then and then in Europe, you know  Raxus a sense and people liked it was a bit of a spectacle and it was a bit interesting.

And yeah, people would come up  Usually the nerdy guys would come up and and talk about the stuff when I was when  it, you know became DX centered, you know, but after 1983 I 84  There were, there were questions, but the first thing that happened was that people went out and bought them. I can remember demonstrating at a store in Hong Kong, Tommy Lee's famous  Hong Kong store where the musicians from that area, you know, Australia and all the rest of it, they'd all go to Hong Kong to buy their stuff. 

I was, I was demonstrating in his store  and I was literally just  Sitting down playing  playing presets and there was a little group of people sort of like they'd come they'd listen But then they'd walk up and there was a queue a line out the store out the shop around the you know Round on the street.

Yeah, I'd seem to remember I don't know Gary if you can remember this from various meetings in Japan  But I I do and I looked some of this data out, but at the time 1983 84 the best selling  Um, polyphonic synthesizer, I think was the profit six or five. I can't remember.  And it sold about 15, 000 units worldwide. 

That was, that was the synthesizer business. That was the pinnacle.  And I can remember Hirano san saying, I, we used to, cause I think both Gary and I,  much as we were there for the love of the music and sound and all the rest of it, the economics of this thing was interesting, you know, and we'd ask questions at Yamaha and I said, how many of these things do you think you're going to sell?

And I can remember Hirano saying, Oh, we want to beat, uh, profit, you know,  hope to sell 18, 000 units in first year, you know, Oh, that's a lot. I'm thinking.  They sold 150,  000.  I can remember guys at Yamaha France.  Uh, you know, when I was working in,  in France, some of the sales will look like the head salesman there.

He was hiding orders from dealers.  Oh my God. You've got a special pipe. The dealers were sending their orders in for DX seven and they just couldn't cope with it. They couldn't deal with it. He was, he was hiding them.  It was, it was, it was a massive sales team. The, the musicians told us they, they, they wanted this instrument.

And I think we all have our theories. My, my theory is that the DX seven was the first electric piano that you could actually carry without breaking your back.  Um, the, the touch sensitivity, the way that mapping touch sensitivity to modulation index.  Gave a beautiful expansion of the,  the spectrum,  which was,  you know, akin to certainly metal being hit harder and probably other acoustic items, strings being plucked harder and so on. 

And I think that that touch sensitivity, which Gary and I learned by ear  did something magic, you know,  was something which made the DX seven,  not so much an, not so much a synthesizer, but an instrument.  Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that was. To me, that was always the important thing, the gesture mapping. It separated the good players from the not so good players.

So the people who had really good piano technique learned how to use that. It rewarded them. Musicianship. Yes, it did. And it also,  I don't know if you guys can remember the experience of going into a music shop and playing the synthesizer.  It was a little, you know, with an ordinary synthesizer, you had to be a bit cautious when you press the key down because you didn't really know what was going to happen and the key was a switch and if the, if the amps were turned up loud, it was now, you know, but the DX seven, you could approach it like a piano, you know, and if you're curious that someone's listening because you're not very good, you know, you just tap it gently and it whispers to you. 

So it not only rewarded good playing it rewarded. Normal human curiosity as well. It was, uh, Yeah, rewarded technique and phrasing.  Analog synths didn't at the time. I have a great John Chowning story. I don't know if John remembers.  I made a sound. Dave and I had to do a signature series wrong for Yamaha.

Oh yeah, I remember. So we had Gary Bristow,  and then the SY77 came out, and Dave and I were let go from Yamaha,  and they hired some young programmers, and then called Dave and I back and said, Oh, can you please help the S Y 77?  So, so I was making a sequence and I was trying to do a big brass band. I had made, you know, this great tuba and horns and I did Hogan's heroes from the TV show. 

Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. And I put it in the S Y 77 sequencer and I hit play  and I had made all my sounds for the signature ROM.  And suddenly the screen went blank,  and a little volcano came up on the screen with a little Japanese Buddha. And he rose up from the top of the volcano in a puff of smoke. And then it said, sorry,  and it erased all my stuff.

Yeah. So I called Hirano and I said, what happened? Oh, we so sorry. We forgot to take that out of the software. So I, so I made this pick guitar sound and I'm in San Francisco and I had a Yamaha midi grand piano and pick guitar, and I pulled the mute on the piano. So all you could hear was the pick guitar.

And John came in to the Hyatt Regency and I'm playing. Angie by Simon and Garfunkel.  And I'm playing this great sound and John's looking at the Yamaha piano.  And I started hitting the key on the piano and pushing it and bending the guitar note because the midi grand has after Dutch and John looked down and said, Oh my God, how are you doing that?

And I said, well, it's easy, John. When I pushed the key. The entire plate of the piano bends,  and the strings bend,  and John's looking at the piano and goes, You're kidding, that's amazing. And I said, yeah, there's 40 tons of piano pressure when tuned to A440, but it had aftertouch.  But, Dave remembers,  I had the original Yamaha Punk Organ in my store from 1887. 

A little Yamaha reed organ.  And I never knew it was from Yamaha. I bought it in San Francisco for 40 bucks at a pawn shop.  And the Japanese came in one day and saw the little emblems on it and said, This is the original Yamaha organ from Hamamatsu. That Mr. Yamaha carried from Momoto to the Tokyo Conservatory. 

And so,  Yamaha asked me to develop something called the MIDI Grand Piano, which I still have.  And it's, I had it in my studio and one day Yamaha called and said, Gary, do you still have the MIDI Grand Piano? I had sold my shop in San Francisco. And I thought, I cannot tell a lie  because I have this piano they forgot about in my studio and I said, can I call you back?

And they said, yeah. So I called back five minutes later. I said, I still have the mini gram. They said, you want to buy it? I said, how much? And they said 42, 000. I said, Carolyn, I don't have that kind of money right now,  but I have an idea. Tell Terry, the president of Yamaha, I'll trade them the original Yamaha pump organ.

For a mini grand piano and Julie Angel said,  you're out of your mind. He'll never go for that. And I said, just ask him, call back five minutes later and said,  done. So Carol and I went to Boyna park and they have the original Yamaha pump organ in the, in the factory. And I got, I got my piano for 40 bucks. 

Um, Manny, you and I. Recently did a presentation at SynthFest UK and we, you know, we, we talked about FM through the ages from the DX7 through to Montage and MODX and you know, you and I both know the reaction we got from that today, 40 years on people are still getting really enthusiastic and I think the, the thing that really struck home about that was that after we finished,  we went down to the Yamaha booth And they said there was a noticeable increase in footfall around the Modi X, uh, keyboards after as soon as we'd finished.

So clearly that the, the interest and the passion is still there because,  you know, yourself through your demonstrations, you know, wowed the audience. What  But what do you think that is? You know, 40 years on, it's still making people go, wow, and really, you know, be interested in it.  Dave already touched on this, which is, it is a synthesis, a type of synthesis that allows for such expression and control that's can be different depending on how you play it, you know, because  the fantastic thing about it is like Dr.

Channing mentioned,  even though there's all these math equations that explain it.  It plays in a very natural way, just out of the box. So when Dave was saying just getting velocity to index of modulators, okay, giving you something that you couldn't get in any other synthesizer at the time, and in a space that was both  similar and different timbrally,  it's lost upon the youngins of these days of mega samples, sample switching libraries.

on how important that is. And I think that audience that we had were able to see again, the power of those simple  accumulations of two operator interactions. Especially what some of the sounds when, when you did Rhapsody in Blue with the piano sound at the end, I mean, the audience came on glued, man.  So, exactly, because it's, it's, it's synthesis, it's not samples.

And, you know, I never got a chance to meet Don Lewis, but I was honored to the fantastic job he did playing that piano sound at the NAMM show in 2019 when Dr. Chowning was with him.  Um, and you know, they were showcasing  the real time control of FM that took the timbre space from outer space.  to a very playable, dynamic, recognizable sound that everybody knew, all with the twist of a knob.

And I think when we showed them the, uh, control of the, um, morph space that was in the MODX. Okay. When we showed them, even the, TX 816 technology, where I was doing things that, I mean, Dr. Chowning's original research was FM for spatialization and things, and, you know, I'm synthesizing reverbs and space and ambience in a TX 816.

People just didn't know that technology could do this, because technology moves so fast, their ear catches something new, and we have this bias towards realism, and when sampling came in, people missed The dynamic control and then it just got shown to them again. I think that's what it was. It's just what Dave said.

It's just, it's expressive. It's so dang expressive. But there's another thing about FM that I thought was really important. Looking back, it's not something you could have known at the time.  All through the seventies, those of us who were playing with synthesizers, we'd essentially taught ourselves.  What a sawtooth wave sounded like. 

And I think most people who played synthesizers could differentiate between a sawtooth wave, a square wave, and a sine wave. We just learned it  and  by learning that you tend to think that the waveform is the thing that describes sound.  But when you think about it, it doesn't. They're just squiggles.  Right?

It doesn't really tell you much about how it sounds. But then once you get to FM,  in order to even, even to understand FM, if you want to understand a little bit about the mechanics of FM, about how it works, you have to start thinking in the spectral domain. Start thinking about  something that perhaps you've learned at school that sounds have overtones, but you never quite knew what they were.

Now you've got to, you know, you do have to have some idea of what the spectrum is. And I think FM  encourages that way of thinking, which is a much more, I mean, it still doesn't tell you everything, of course,  but it gives you a much clearer idea about sound itself, you know, how it works.  Even how filters work, you know, they don't let those high ones through, that sort of thing.

Exactly. And I totally agree because to the point we said earlier, it's an ear thing, right? So you have your four stack, which was never envisioned in the day, but you go in there and you start putting some higher ratios higher in that stack, just add a little touch, all of a sudden you hear spectrally where that result is in the thing.

Oh, it's coming up in the high there, or it's coming up in the mid here. And then once your ear hears that, it just becomes so naturalistic. I'm putting it back together and The infamous stuff, right? You know, so, so much things that people don't understand that what we find satisfying about playing these instruments are those little quirks and transients that, you know, can be added dynamically  that make the difference between something just feeling right.

I mean, when I did the piano sound, I think I have across the sounds, I must have 24 operators just doing stuff.  And the key to the sound, besides it sonically, but playing it, is having the right subtle delay on the attack, the right slopes and all those things. So all those transients just line up, so that if you turn off the actual harmonic part of it, and you just play the stuff patches, it literally sounds, and it It feels like you're playing  keys hitting wood and metal,  and it's almost like a, it's almost like a physical, it's like a, it's a, it's a psychosynthesis as much as anything.

And traditional analog synthesis doesn't have that, ironically, even samples don't because they capture a moment in time and you have to have so many multi samples, but, um, it's just the dynamicism, response to input. It's still so fantastic. I think I have to take credit for the word stuck  because when Dave and I were in Japan, you know. 

He'd create that little after thing for the harpsichord and I said, Dave, what do we call it? Let's call it stuff or the chip on the flute. Let's call it stuff.  And I got a call from a guy named Howard Sandroff. Does anybody remember him? No, I remember Howard. University of Chicago. And he said, can you come and do a DX7 demonstration, but don't get too technical.

And I said, okay, Howard. And right in this room, I have a sign above the door. It says piano department that Howard gave me.  So I did a workshop  and everybody said, how do you make an organ sound? And what is the feedback loop? And I said, well, John developed a feedback loop  to Dave's joy. And Dave made the first brass sound on the jazz one.

It was an amazing thing. And the people said, well, can you tell me how you created this? Is it an exponential or a linear curve? And I said, Forget all that. It's all about stuff. And they said, well, show us.  So I told Howard, go to the corner and get a six pack of beer.  So I brought in six beers and put them on the table and everybody said, what are you doing?

And I said, this is algorithm number 32. It's six operators. And if you want to excite. The frequencies, you turn on the feedback loop and the guy says, well, how do you do that? So I shook up the six beer cans and then open them up  and sprayed the audience  and said,  that's, that's, that's how you create a sound.

What happened, um, Dave, if you remember is we were doing the final programming of the DX7  and you created all those great sounds.  And we went and did a presentation in Tokyo using the two DX5s, I think, right? I think it was the DX7 Mark II, Gary. Oh, DX7 Mark II. Don't you remember? The DX7 Mark II introduced microtuning. 

Yes. You could tune every, yeah. Manny's sticking his thumbs up. My goodness, that brought every academic musician out of the woodwork. At the trade shows, people just wanted microtuning.  All sorts of weird and wonderful music software was beginning to appear then.  But do you remember that the microtuning, when we were originally doing the, uh, microtuning, um, it didn't work?

You couldn't actually store, we couldn't store, and we were supposed to do this demonstration in Tokyo, and I can remember Keith Taniguchi  looking at Gary and I, and, you know, with his eyes, and his eyes were a bit glazed over, and he said, oh, please, you will demonstrate microtuning.  And I remember Gary saying,  uh, Keith, I'm sorry, it, it, It doesn't work.

We can't demonstrate the micro tuning. It doesn't, it doesn't work. And Keith Taniguchi said, I can remember this so clearly. He said, Yeah, I know,  but please demonstrate it anyway,  you know, because it was in, I mean, you know, say why? Because it's already in the brochure, you know,  needless to say, they did get it working eventually, but not for that show.

Yeah, we couldn't do it. But you, you, Gary, you made.  A piano where you stretched the tuning a little bit. Stretch tuned it. I remember that. Yeah. To try and get a little bit more realism out of the FM piano, which was tough. We're talking there about, you know, the DX7 Mark II, which came out in 1987. But that brought in, as you said, micro tuning, fractional scaling, unison, poly.

Yep. You know, there was a, and it was bitumbral as well. So the Mark II was the seven, the DX7. Dynamic stereo panning. Dynamic stereo panning, all these extra little things. And yet, you know, the D 50 came along and it was a new world and a new day. Um, we then moved on to the S Y's and that added, uh, advanced FM and, you know, different way forms that we'd seen originally in things like the, uh, the TX eight one Zed and the, and the DX 11,  then.

You know, that was the 90s and at the very end of the 1990s, this unit comes out called the FS 1R, which now increased the operators to eight, but also introduced formant shaping and sequencing.  And I read somewhere, and John, correct me if I'm wrong, but I read somewhere that you had said that this was probably  the most natural path. 

For FM synthesis two to follow at this point in time that, that, that Fort Shaping was a natural partner in some respects to that. Um, and since then, Yamaha have brought out, uh, the, the Montage and the Mod DX that uses the FMX engine, which has the eight operators of the FS one R'S FM engine, but lacks that Fort Shaping so.

My question is, and I'll start with you, John, if I may, where do you see the future of FM synthesis and do you regret Yamaha not following on with that version of FM that we saw in that one small unit for about a year or so?  Yes, sure, because,  you know, all musical instruments, and especially the voice, as the one with which you're most familiar, have resonances, you know. 

And these, these, like, in speech, they call these formants, well, they're resonances. And they're such a huge part of every of the natural acoustic world, equivalent to, maybe second in order of importance to what Dave pointed out, the idea of, of  key velocity and  expanding the spectrum as a function of, of,  uh, you know, strike force. 

But the, that, I did these FM voices in Paris in 1979  and, uh, Uh, it created astonishingly good singing voices using fm, where the three carriers  and one modulator, the modulating frequency at the pitch frequency f subzero,  and the carrier frequencies were set  to the closest harmonic of a desired format.

So if the foreman was somewhere around four 80 or four 70. Then the little algorithm would search for the closest harmonic and set the carrier frequency to that harmonic. So it was a multiple, always a multiple of the,  of the modulating frequency. And had that been implemented and it would have been so easily done. 

It would have introduced a whole nother set of complexities which would have been expressive and musical and in the same way that the key velocity was in the spectral domain.  Manny, um, I know you worked on the FS1R voicing. Um, can you add to that? Exactly. What, what John was saying is that, The expansion of that temporal behavior, not just, not just so you could create it statically, but then of course you could apply modulations and dynamicisms to it, you know, was pretty,  I don't want to say groundbreaking, but it's almost  to the same degree that physical modeling was trying to give people something new but was natural, um, and could be inherently expressive.

And it, um,  It was interesting to get your head around it. In fact, the first official thing I worked with Gary That was it. I remember. He came down to L. A. And it was, uh,  it was very strange for me to show him the ropes. He did a great job. So, um,  and  What we tried to do in the presets was, you know, a couple of different things.

I mean, obviously everybody talks about the vocal characteristics that were shown off and they wanted to just show off something completely different. So they had the lo fi sampler version of it. They had the talking version of it,  but buried in the thousands of presets behind that wonderfully great interface.

Um,  a lot of the work I did was taking my best acoustic style instruments from my DX7 II libraries and adding in the format behaviors to them. So if you start going into some of the keyboard sounds that are in there, some of the guitar and plucked instrument sounds that are in there, and some of the percussive sounds that are in there, and you actually start.

playing them and see how they respond, they're completely different than other FM sounds that are, that are in there. And to be honest with you, they're completely overlooked because the instrument got dropped so quickly because again, it wasn't a sampler. What do I need that drum sound for? I got drum samples.

Um, but there's a lot of stuff in that that is  terribly unexplored. Uh, because of that you also left out one other thing. It also had eight noise operators that you had real time noise shaping for and you talked about being, you know, stuff heaven, you know, that that was that as well. So there is a lot of power in that.

And so combining those qualities in that FM engine. Yeah, it is disappointing. They didn't continue that, you know, moving forward because there's so much great stuff there, you know, but at the end of the day, I kind of understand it because you have to have it. Yeah. A user interface that allows you to leverage it in a way that people like myself, Gary, and Dave can actually create stuff that people want to play.

Because at the end of the day, you have to put the box in front of you, and you have to want to play it. And, as Dave so importantly noticed, when you sat down in front of the DX7, you wanted to play it. And, uh, they weren't able to recapture that for just the dynamics of the markets, in my opinion, you know.

I would love to spend more time getting back into that. as a synthesis thing, because even I basically abandoned it early on and probably only know a fraction of what it does. The GS 1,  it was an amazing instrument. I have a little poster on my wall from Quincy Jones.  And Quincy, when Dave and I did Artist Relations, Doug Buddleman would call us and say,  we have all these musicians that want to sound.

So Quincy called and said,  I'm doing an album for this kid named Michael Jackson, and I need a bass sound.  He said, where are you? And I said, I'm in Marin County. He said, can you get to the Golden Gate Bridge, Gary? I said, sure.  He says, I want you to do two things. Get a ball peen hammer,  and  bring your ears, and a little dat recorder, and. 

He said, you have a car, and I said, well right now I'm a rock star, so I have a Porsche. So I drove to the Golden Gate Bridge, he said, hit one of those cables with a hammer,  and that's the sound I want. So I drove to the Golden Gate Bridge, I hit one of those long cables, it went twang.  I came home, I went to the jazz one, and made this sound of bass. 

And about a week later he called and he said, Oh, thank you for that sound. I used it on an album called Body Heat that he did.  And then I think he used it on Billie Jean.  Um, Dave, you know,  you, you are synonymous with, you know, the DX7.  Is there anything you would like an FM synthesizer in 2023 to do that, you know, we haven't seen yet, or is there any difference, uh, that you'd like to, to see out there?

You know,  that's a real hard question because it's, it isn't just the,  the sound engine. anymore. I'm a little bit disappointed in the, not in the development of sound engines, but, but the, but the mechanical bodies don't seem to have changed much. We've still got, you know, like 49 key plastic keys, synthesizers  with a bunch of knobs. 

That seems to be, to me, I feel like that's the only thing that the manufacturers heard the musicians say. We want a lot of knobs, which was something that followed the DX7, but which didn't have knobs. You know, you had to display parameters and move through them. As far as sound edging go, I still enjoy, I mean, if I wanted, if I'm just doodling around,  amusing myself, then I'll pull up FM8.

You know, from native instruments, uh, as a software synth, I don't lug stuff around anymore. I'm, I'm happy making music inside my computer, but also I, if I want FM, I'm equally likely to grab reactor and just build a quick FM synth. It'll do everything that I want to do.  Recently, during COVID lockdown, I got sent this device.

I don't know if you can see that.  Ah yes, the Korg OP6. The Korg OP6! This came out of nowhere. I got a call from Korg. The Yamaha guys and the Korg guys, they're always, they're very sort of incestuous. They're always moving backwards and forwards. And I got a call and someone said, Oh, perhaps I would be interested in helping with some sound development. 

The UI people sort of threw it. And I did. I really, I spent probably six months, you know, backwards and forwards on Zoom, anyway.  Making some things. And I mean, that's The nice thing about that instrument  is it's cheap. I mean, it's like 7  or 800 or something. And it's um, a really nice FM synth. There's nothing  spectacularly different about it.

But you can, you can, you can organize things and get some like formant. shaping and stuff going and it's got plenty of noise. It's, um,  it's, it's probably what Gary and I would have loved for a DX, DX7 Mark II  when DX Mark II came out,  you know, if effects processing and all that, then that's a, that's a nice little machine.

Gentlemen, I don't often get the chance to thank the people that have influenced me over a great many years, and I'm not going to miss this opportunity, so Manny, Gary, David, and especially John, you have influenced my upbringing. In the music that I heard, which was predominantly FM based in the 1980s, your sounds on the instruments that Yamaha, and as John mentioned earlier, you know, a great many people at Yamaha were responsible for those, but you guys made the sounds and John, you came up with the idea.

You found the idea and your work has informed my life over many, many years. And I just want to say thank you to each and every one of you for your input. It has been, you know, it's been a real pleasure. to speak to you today. Thank you ever so much. Yeah, that's very nice of you, Robin. You're very, very welcome. 

So I'll just say that as  you can tell from all the characters you're surrounded by, it was all for love. We're all musicians and once you get into it, we love what we did. We followed our passions and especially our ears. As I've said, for all my training,  And the most important tool that I ever had was my ears. 

Thank you for listening, and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information, along with web links and details of all the other episodes. Before you go, make sure you visit the Sound On Sound podcast page at soundonsound. com forward slash podcasts, where you can explore all the other great content playing across the other channels. 

I'm Rob Pericelli, and this has been a failed Muso production for Sound on Sound.