Description:
The synthesizer you never knew you wanted but you will today.
Mention you’re a fan of the DX-9, and folks will stare at you. Try to convince them that the DX-9 is a worthy member of the Yamaha synth family, and they’ll start throwing rocks at you until you leave town.

Why the hatred? Well, when you look closely, it’s not that the DX-9 was really such a horrible board…just that it had a few seriously crippling implementation flaws. At $1500 in 1983, the little brother to the time-honored $1999 DX-7 just didn’t have anything to recommend him. While 4OP synthesis proved to be viable later, Yamaha didn’t have the experience working with it quite yet, and the patches, while hardly tragedies, hadn’t yet reached the glory days of the later DX-11 and legendary TX81Z. It certainly didn’t hav the flimsy DX-2x era case mounting, the DX-100’s toy keys, and while its MIDI implementation was crude, so was its big brother the DX-7’s, and that sure didn’t it from dominating the synth market. It wasn’t velocity-sensitive, but that alone shouldn’t have ended its sale life.

So what was the real disaster that killed the DX-9? I’ll tell ya.

Twenty presets in RAM, and instead of easy-to-swap cartridges like the DX-7, the DX-9 supported…a cassette interface. That’s right, you heard me right, working musicians — you had to hook up a cassette player, rewind frantically between songs, pray you rewound it the right amount to get the data set you wanted, press play, start the keyboard loading, and wait, wait, wait. Hope your lead singer’s chatty, ’cause between-song pauses are gonna be worse than a PBS pledge drive. (”Now, this is a little number I whipped up while deep-sea diving in the Arctic last week, that I like to think conjures up memories of Jim Morrison, Tupac, and Mozart all at once…you ready back there, Johnny? Johnny’s on the keys, folks, and he saved five hundred bucks by choosing that DX-9 he’s cursing at, the one with the cassette drive that’s spewing ribbons of tape into his face, so let me tell ya more…”)

No self-respecting working musician was going to tolerate this, and no studio was going to choose the board without the long-term support and patch library. The DX-9 never sold, never sld when FM synth came back into vogue, and now it’s become that embarrassing wasteaway seen cluttering up the listing’s in the Daddy’s Junky Music catalogues. I half-expect, the next time I order $100 or more, to get a free one in the shipment as a gift.

Okay, so the RAM and patch-loading logistics were absolutely unforgivable. But aside from that, it wasn’t that bad a board! It featured 16-note polyphony like its big brother, rock-solid case and those classic DX keys, and if you didn’t mind waiting on the tape, it didn’t sound half bad.

Presented for your FM8 pleasure, you’ll find all six banks of 20 presets from the tape, converted to FM8 format with the occasional glitch corrected. Loading time, I think, has greatly improved, eh?

Oh, but if you miss it, don’t worry. My friend who actually owns one of these things has generously recorded the tape for you, all six tracks, and I’ve included them in MP3 form for your listening…pleasure? You could plug the output of your sound card to a real DX-9 to load them, or you could play them and marvel that Yamaha thought any working musician would wait that long to load twenty lousy presets. (At $1500, this synth wasn’t for home user.) The voice you hear is his, by the way, not mine.

Attentive users will note the HEAVY METAL patch is in bank 5 instead of one of the SYNTH LEAD patches. Later DX-9’s featured this patch, even though the manual didn’t update to reflect this. I don’t know if the tape MP3 contains it or not — my Sysex dumps came from a different source, as I can’t do much with that tape MP3 without an actual DX-9. I was told that the patch was effectively an earlier version of HEAVY METAL designed as a piercing synth lead.

Load times and memory limitations are gone in this virtual version, and I dare say, those fixed, this is a sweet little synth, isn’t it? Nicely retro, and the direct ancestor of every later 4OP synth. This was the board that proved 4OP viable, and as such, the humble and maligned DX-9 deserves its recognition among the golden age synthesizers of the FM Eighties. This was the product line that won the FM battle ultimately, and my beloved V50 traces its lineage not back to the DX-7, but to this little redheaded stepchild of the synth world.

Take a moment, friends, to pay your respects to the board that started the 4OP ball rolling. With its limitations solved virtually, it’s a very worthy addition to your virtual Yamaha collection.

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