What is happening on the DX7 when programs are changing?Īnother thing which confused me was the usage of the modulation wheel. It is a good score! Unfortunately this little detail is missing and unfortunately it's an important detail. It should say it in the score, but I really don't want to say it's a bad score, indeed it is a very good one: everything is there, the patches, annotations on certain passages of the piece, annotations on the notation, on the piece itself, on the global parameters of the synths and how they change when playing both pieces. This may or may not result in the strange sound and it is also not quite clear to me, where exactly these changes should occur. However, some of these squares also feature an arrow which is meant to say that the program change has to happen at exactly this time.
In the score, program changes are depicted as numbers in squares. I have yet to find out what exactly is happening, however, it is something that Tristan Murail makes use of. As opposed to all the emulations I came across the DX7 does not stop the sound when changing a program but keeps on playing the envelopes, albeit with different algorithms. The main thing is: the DX7 makes strange sounds when changing from one program to the next. What one needs to know when playing the two pieces: Off to Brussels for rehearsals with Frederik Croene.Įntrance Jean-Luc Pluvier, who was most helpful by providing scans of the patches and giving me hints on some peculiarities of the DX7 and how they were employed in the pieces. They sounded slightly different, especially with some sounds using vibrato, but all in all they sounded alright and were a good basis to start working. Finally I could start play the music and actually listen to the patches and compare Dexed and FM8. Only now, nearly three months later had I finished the first item on my ToDo-list. The zip-file contains the two SysEx-files and a read me with more explanations. I take no guarantee that everything is correct, but unless somebody checks all of this again this is probably as good as it gets. Think of me as a life wasted.Īnyhow, here's the goodies: all the patches for both pieces, one bank for each synth.
Why do I have to do this? Should I not rather practice the music? Must be my karma or something. What we are talking here is checking over 6000 parameters by hand for both Atlantys and Vision de la cité interdite. Here's how the patches look like in the score (it's quite a nasty print and sometimes I were not really sure if it's a 3 or an 8 we're talking):Īnd this is one of the 50 patches that had to be corrected: Knowing that I didn't have all the numbers right, and knowing that Sascha Lino Lemke had used the same program for the patches for Atlantys the next horror already approached my door: printing out the DX7 Librarian patches, comparing them with the patches printed in the score and correcting them using Dexed. More time needed at the start but probably well worth it. Note to self: maybe I should have attached a MIDI controller, mapped the 120 controls to it and went from there. I do not think it would have been faster using Dexed of FM8 because they all need the mouse, and that just takes much more time. I would think it's five times faster doing it on the hardware synth.
Interestingly, now that I have a DX7 standing next to me, it would have been much easier to use the often criticized interface of the synth to do it: right hand chooses the parameter, left hand moves the data entry slider, done. I have done boring stuff before, but this was bad. That's over 4000 parameters that I had to dial in on these tiny little sliders. There are 36 patches for both synths in Vision de la cité interdite.
However, the main issue is somewhere else: each DX7 patch has about 120 parameters (not counting the global "Function" parameters, but only the actually patch settings). 39 was unreachable, and so were quite a few numbers. What's worse, some numbers it would simply not take and jump for example from 38 to 40. Unfortunately the DX7 Librarian is a bit fiddly to use: one cannot just type numbers but everything has to be done with the mouse and the sliders are rather small. Alright, so I chose to do the patches with the DX7 Librarian, because FM8 uses a completely different terminology (for example using real time units instead of the DX7's 0-99 steps).