Then I downloaded a MIDI file and used Audacity to play some of its channels into the synth. Super easy, even though I'd never used Audacity for MIDI before.
Just one thing stumped me for a minute: When you open the MIDI settings in the Dexed app, under “Active MIDI inputs” it shows a list of available buses, all with what looks like a green light next to it, as if they are indeed active. Those are actually checkboxes and they're initially off.
- It's super CPU efficient on modern hardware, so you can use as many instances as you like.
- You can use it to do reasonably convincing physical modeling of many real instruments (or at least the start of it)
- There is little phase smearing or analog noise.
- Even for percussive instruments, you can tune and shape harmonic boundaries so that your instruments gel in the mix.
- Building instruments through sine wave decomposition/recomposition encourages bandwidth efficient sound design and instrument arrangements. They sound sweet to the ear, and instead of using the full bandwidth of a sawtooth or square wave, you can use the first few partials (or a couple choice ones) to sketch out the idea of one without taking up all of the space the full thing would.
- (At least with FM8), The multipoint envelopes editor is as flexible as a DAWs automation curve editor. It uses a zoomable spline based UI that feels a little bit like using Illustrator's pen tool.
- (Matter of taste) It's really easy to get retro video game sounds, so composing with these instruments always triggers pleasant nostalgia for me, even if I'm not writing VGM. This is not a surprise.
- Yamaha's sibling OPL/OPN (YMxxxx) series is responsible for powering sound synthesis in the Sega Genesis, MSX, Sound Blaster and sound cards and arcade game systems of the 80s and 90s.
If I can make a synesthetic analogy to a physical material, it's a lot like silicone. You can make it lifelike, almost unsettlingly or cartoonishly so. It pairs well, and fittingly, with the 80s and the 90s.
Unrelated: I've played with Dexed a bit, but I just can't get over twiddling knobs on screen ...
ETA: there's also https://www.webaudiomodules.org/wamsynths/webdx7/ , but sound is pretty crackly on my setup :/
- Some sibling comments have noted that you can built Dexed for Linux. If you can give that a shot and get it to build and run MIDI to it, it's one of the easiest ways you can get things going.
- If you're not partial to the OS you're using (unlikely for most people, I know), give it a shot on OSX.
- Otherwise, you might want to give KXStudio [1] a shot. It's an Ubuntu distro built by Paulo Coelho (@falkTX), who did some great work building Carla [2], which I believe is an evolution of dssi-vst [3]. dssi-vst uses the VeSTige emulator (which may be Wine based) and built a VST to DSSI adapter layer over it; I believe @falkTX forked dssi-vst, improved it over time and eventually came up with Carla. You could use Carla to run an instance of windows Dexed.
- Be aware that it's tricky to get a stable driver chain working properly with Linux (and I suppose you could say the same for Windows, too). You'll want to use a community blessed audio interface and other system components in your computer if you want the highest likelihood of stability. Results aren't guaranteed.
Personally, after multiple tries over the past ten years with a variety of hardware, a combination of bad luck and lack of time led me to give up and go back to the old reliable option, which for me is OSX. There's nothing worse than being in the middle of working on a track with your inspiration going, only to have your computer freeze and reboot losing your last half an hour of work if you forgot to save. But I'd love to be able to stay use Linux for music software.
Frankly, @falkTX's work with KXStudio is impressive, and it continues to evolve. Maybe there will come a day in the future when I can finally make the leap again.
Second of all, to folks that are trying to figure out how to give this a go: Open up your favorite DAW (try out Reaper[1] if you don't have one yet), download an install the fantastic open source DX7 emulator plugin Dexed VST plugin [2] and have fun.
In my opinion, FM synthesis is one of the finest things in life I've ever experienced. I never understood the whole culture around an emotional attachment to one's guitar before I realized how closely I could bond with my FM synthesis instruments. It was about five years ago when it started to feel a bit more like an extension of my brain and less like a tool. Now, I've always been an FM8 person myself because of the envelopes, but obviously the DX7 shaped synthesizers have the superior library.
I'm always overjoyed to see projects that get more folks into the joy of music with FM synthesis.
[1] https://www.reaper.fm/
[2] https://asb2m10.github.io/dexed/