NAMM:Yamaha's New DX200 FM Groovebox

US It's a DX-7 engine in a box with knobs on 30/01/01

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The DX200 has a DX7 engine inside. A 6 operator FM synthesis engine with 16 voices and is 4 part multi timbral. It also has a 16 step analog style sequencer and drum machine with over 100 sounds built in - sort in the same vein as the Electribe series. But what we thought was cool was that it will read all your old (and I mean old) DX-7 patches - giving access to an enormous patch library of unique sounds. The sequencer is five part, 4 for beats and one for the synth with real time mutes for extra on-the-fly tweaks. It's not going to replace your software based sequnecer but fast and fun seems to be the approach here. What may make this unit a big seller is the fact that there are a lot folks out there who remember the DX but sold them or discarded them as a result of them being a pig to edit. This is somewhat solved by the fact that this has knobs to access some parameters (Portamento, Harmonic, Decay and noise level and others). There is also (of course) Cutoff and Resonance + filter envelope depth. All knobs are recordable as part of a pattern. It is also possible to store a snapshot (or several) and morph between them. There's also a built in FX unit offering delay, flanger, phaser and over-drive FX. The unit also comes with a great editing package (PC only at present) which we are told will be available from the Yamaha website. Personally, I can't wait to get my hands on one - it'll be great to access all those DX voices ones again..

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