The Korg Volca FM is a DX7 emulation built with modern twenty-first century technology. We kind of miss the beast… but no, not really. Its somewhat brittle sound and its propensity for creating audible background noise when it was played saw it supplanted by newer instruments which, if less versatile, ultimately sounded better.Īs of this writing, we gave away our last DX7 over a decade ago. In more recent epochs, the acoustic shortcomings of the DX7 came to spell its doom, at least for us. Thousands of 32-voice banks were authored for the DX7 and its early progeny, and most of them survive to this day. Having created new voices, said voices could be downloaded over its MIDI interface, stored on what passed for computers back then, shared and subsequently re-uploaded.
One of the coolest aspects of the DX7 was its capability of having its voices edited through its user interface to create new sounds – albeit only after its users got its somewhat mind-numbing FM synthesis technology by the throat. It required a lot of head banging, long words and complicated math to fully master it was expensive, huge and heavy its keyboard was plastic and a bit nasty and its bronze-age digital to analog converters were fairly noisy and gave everything it played a vaguely electronic edge.
Unlike other keyboard synthesizers of that period, it generated sounds not by plugging oscillators and filters together, but by actual algorithmic digital synthesis, or “FM synthesis.” The result was the ability to create an almost inexhaustible palette of real and imaginary instruments, rich, textured music and enough special effects to frighten an entire alien invasion. The Yamaha DX7 was a remarkable instrument for its day, its day being some time in 1983.