Yamaha DX7

Mark wrote, feel free not to air this correction and cast it into the bin of overly nitpicking feedback, but I want to point out an error on this weekend's show on vibe coding custom firmware for audio gear.

In the episode, Rich Straffolino mentioned that the Yamaha DX7 is featured on the Van Halen song Jump.

While Rich is correct that the DX7, a digital synthesizer, is ubiquitous in 80s pop music, it was not used on Jump.

The synth used on Jump was the Oberheim OBXA, an analog synthesizer.

Other than that, it was an excellent episode, and I learned a few things, and I bought an M-Wave FM1.

Everything was going bright.

We were going DX7.

We were going super bright on our EQ of our drums and the bright reverbs.

So the guitar had to say, hey, how am I going to cut through this? And Landau developed a very unique chain of pedalboard effects and things in order to get this sound.

They did.

So what does this all mean for the legacy of the Berlin School? Because the 80s give us digital synthesizers like the Yamaha DX7 and more importantly, the invention of MIDI.

And MIDI fundamentally altered the soul of the music.

How so?

And they, they have a, they have some really cool synth sounds.

They also, um, used the Yamaha DX7-

Mm-hmm

... uh, which many apparently consider, uh, to be the, uh, first successful t- full digital synthesizer.

So this is a very inexpensive gizmo, especially for what it is.

What it is out of the box is a recreation of a Yamaha DX7.

So it's a frequency modulation FM synthesizer, uh, based on an iconic synth, the, the Yamaha DX7, and you can adjust the operator, uh, sounds.

You can-- there's a bunch of presets.

You can import real DX7 presets into it, which for legal reasons they didn't include some of the, uh, the classics, but some pretty similar ones are in there.

Let me, uh, let me see if I can adjust presets here.

Let's go to, like, brass.

It was just so prototypical.

Ear- early '80s, before everything got so glossy and, and the DX7 came out and everybody was using the same keyboard and-

Yeah

...

So, um, tell me about, for starters, like, when, when was that written? It sounds '80s, uh, just because of, of the, the keyboard demo and hearing other things from that time and place.

Is that, like, a DX7 or what, what can you tell me about the origins of that demo and that tune?

Well, yeah, the, the origin of the demo is that, uh, we moved, um, as my son Bryan will remember, from Philadelphia, um, back home to Ohio in the mid-'80s.

And I think we were actually coming back, if I'm not mistaken, in the summer of, I wanna say 1987.

Um, and I had had a DX7, which would have done a nicer job for this particular demo, but I had sold the DX7, and the only keyboard that I had is one that I had bought for you and your sister to play with.

So the, the keyboard is one of those 50-key little things with the cheesy rhythm section going, and that's what I used to record that, that with, uh, the original demo.

And then later, when I had a nice keyboard, I re-recorded a version of it which may be the one that you're listening to.

Well, luckily, I had a thing in my contract which said I could say yes or no to remixes.

And what they did was they took the master tape of Vision of You, the only thing they used of all the original instruments of Vision of You, they chucked out all the real instruments, put in a load of 80s synths, but they kept the DX7 guide that Rod played for Vision of You for everybody to know what the chords were and stuff like that.

And if you don't know what a DX7 is, it was the first digital sort of synthesizer which could pretend to be string section or a jump Van Halen kind of sound, which is one of its most famous sounds.

It sounds exactly like the 80s.

So they loved it because it was so modern.

And Rod, of course, had one because he always bought the newest thing, whatever the newest thing, and then used it in a really tasteful way.

But this was just a guide.

And it basically had Rod's DX7 guide, me, and then loads of other stuff on it.