>These instruments were mostly of academic interest – I can’t think of any band that used one on stage (but I could be wrong).
Very wrong. The Prophet 5, Oberheim 4/8 voice, Roland Jupiter 8, MemoryMoog, and especially the Yamaha CS80 were all available before the DX7, and very widely used on stage and in the studio.
But they really were stupendously expensive - far too expensive for mere mortals.
(There were also fully polyphonic string synthesizers, which had a very, very simple synthesizer under each note, but they were based more on vintage organ technology.)
So by the time the DX7 appeared, Roland and Korg had already produced semi-analog) instruments with digitally controlled oscillators and analog everything else.
The DX7 stood out because the keyboard responded to velocity, and it had an incredible 16 notes of polyphony. So you could play your fancy jazz chords on the epiano sound with the sustain pedal down, and the notes would respond to your fingers and wouldn't cut off too obviously.
The maximum for a pure analog polysynth was 8 notes, and cheaper models had between four and six notes. No fancy jazz chords. Especially not with sustain.
And the DX7 sound cut through - it was much thinner and more acoustic-sounding. The big analog polysynths sounded much bigger - lush, but less versatile, because they were best suited to string and brass fill-in pads, occasional special FX, and perhaps the occasional lead.
Yamaha did try to take synthesis up another level with physical modelling, which is based on more precise models of strings, reeds, pipes, and other resonators, and they produced a couple of very interesting, very very expensive instruments, before abandoning the tech. Sampling is better for imitating real sounds, and the synthetic sounds you get from physical modelling mostly don't sound all that much more interesting than FM.
We're about due another revolution, because there's so much processor power now a lot of synthesis techniques that used to be impossible are now practical. But culturally there just isn't the interest in experimentation. Electronic sounds live in a few small niches - even with modular - and there's not much of a push to explore outside of them.
> The maximum for a pure analog polysynth was 8 notes, and cheaper models had between four and six notes. No fancy jazz chords. Especially not with sustain.
Some had total polyphony though, by using divide down oscillators.
> The DX7 stood out because the keyboard responded to velocity, and it had an incredible 16 notes of polyphony. So you could play your fancy jazz chords on the epiano sound with the sustain pedal down, and the notes would respond to your fingers and wouldn't cut off too obviously.
The dx7 was capable of making sounds that were simply impossible to create with regular analogue subtractive synthesis, because FM (phase modulation in practice) allowed drastic tonal changes in a timbre "through time". So the attack of a patch could have a completely different "waveform" than its release, thanks to operator interaction. That's what the true novelty, a realism no analogue synth could achieve.
Came to quibble with the “no bands gigged polysynths” slander as well. They did, but only for about a 5 year window where it was economically feasible.
There’s Sequential Prophet 5 all over Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense. Van Halen famously used an Oberheim. Basically any record in the first half of the 80s if it had synths.
Physical modeling is gaining steam these days. A good example is the Osmose, which combines a physical modeling sound engine with a keyboard that not only has polyphonic aftertouch, but lets you wiggle the keys sideways to individually shift their pitches. I have one, and it's easy to sound like you're playing an expressive acoustic instrument; perhaps one that exists in the real world, perhaps not. It's worlds away from any FM I've heard, and more expressive than samples.
They've gotten a lot of professional musicians to rave about it so I'm not convinced experimentation is all that dead.
Osmose isn't the only PM around either. Pianoteq, one of the most popular piano plugins, is pure physical modeling and sounds fantastic (though I wouldn't call this "experimental"). Some of the workstation keyboards use PM too.
we had one in my band nadir bliss. sean loved that thing, he probably still plays it everyday. it's a popular sound texture in the bedroom pop world, aka indie internet artists from like 2014-2020. we played a sort of loud chaotic post punk but some of the songs had a bedroom pop thing. https://nadirbliss.bandcamp.com/album/sharp-distance-2
The key difference, though, as you pointed out, was the price. These analog synths were incredibly expensive, which limited their accessibility to major artists
Nothing brings home quite how much money there was to be made in the music industry in the '80s as seeing the top bands' keyboard rigs. In the video for "The Reflex", Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes is surrounded by a Fairlight CMI, a Jupiter-8 and a Prophet-5. Adjusting for inflation, that's about $250,000 worth of equipment.
Very wrong. The Prophet 5, Oberheim 4/8 voice, Roland Jupiter 8, MemoryMoog, and especially the Yamaha CS80 were all available before the DX7, and very widely used on stage and in the studio.
But they really were stupendously expensive - far too expensive for mere mortals.
(There were also fully polyphonic string synthesizers, which had a very, very simple synthesizer under each note, but they were based more on vintage organ technology.)
So by the time the DX7 appeared, Roland and Korg had already produced semi-analog) instruments with digitally controlled oscillators and analog everything else.
The DX7 stood out because the keyboard responded to velocity, and it had an incredible 16 notes of polyphony. So you could play your fancy jazz chords on the epiano sound with the sustain pedal down, and the notes would respond to your fingers and wouldn't cut off too obviously.
The maximum for a pure analog polysynth was 8 notes, and cheaper models had between four and six notes. No fancy jazz chords. Especially not with sustain.
And the DX7 sound cut through - it was much thinner and more acoustic-sounding. The big analog polysynths sounded much bigger - lush, but less versatile, because they were best suited to string and brass fill-in pads, occasional special FX, and perhaps the occasional lead.
Yamaha did try to take synthesis up another level with physical modelling, which is based on more precise models of strings, reeds, pipes, and other resonators, and they produced a couple of very interesting, very very expensive instruments, before abandoning the tech. Sampling is better for imitating real sounds, and the synthetic sounds you get from physical modelling mostly don't sound all that much more interesting than FM.
We're about due another revolution, because there's so much processor power now a lot of synthesis techniques that used to be impossible are now practical. But culturally there just isn't the interest in experimentation. Electronic sounds live in a few small niches - even with modular - and there's not much of a push to explore outside of them.