1. Steve Sims - DX7 Rhodes patch is fantastic. Hexter - Excellent DX7 emulator for Linux. Plays the real patches and sounds like the real thing. Bristol - DX7 (and others) emulator for Linux. Really nifty as it brings the parameters to the front panel as knobs, making programming and experimenting really easy.
2. Import Dx7 Patches Into Fm8; Ted's Yamaha DX7 Page Ted's Yamaha DX7 Page Ted Felix I finally got myself a DX7. The story begins for me back in High School in 1985. The keyboardist in a band I was in had a DX7 and left it at my house for a weekend along with the manual. I started programming it and was hooked. Haven't touched one since then.

• Dx7 Patches For Dexed
• Dx7 Patches On Modx

The DX7 was also the first synth that originated a huge 'patch creation' business. Since it was cumbersome to edit, many programming houses were established, ready to feed the hunger for new sounds that players all over the world craved. Today, there are literally thousands of sounds available for the DX7.

DX7
Digital programmable algorithm synthesizer

The most famous synthesizer of the 1980s.

Its electric piano became a standard sound in ballads and 'smooth jazz' genres. Its bass was the standard bass sound, typically played in bouncy octaves. Its crystalline timbres were such a departure from the world of analog, that this synth was a super-hit for Yamaha in 1983, and spanned a long family of FM-based products.

The DX7 came out in 1983, sporting the new MIDI interface. The high quality of its digital sounds, velocity + aftertouch, the expandability, the thoroughly professional look, and the complicated programming interface, made the DX7 and FM synthesis take off in a way the was unknown before for synthesizers. Thousands of units were sold, and thousands of records have that distinct DX7 sound (especially for the electric piano, the bass, marimba and glassy, crystal-type sounds).

The DX7 was also the first synth that originated a huge 'patch creation' business. Since it was cumbersome to edit, many programming houses were established, ready to feed the hunger for new sounds that players all over the world craved. Today, there are literally thousands of sounds available for the DX7.

Bottom line: together with D-50 and M1, the synthesizer of the '80s

Don't forget to press FUNCTION (SPACE) and then Nr. 8 to switch from UNAVAIL to AVAIL when loading patches from your sequencer, or the DX7 won't receive the MIDI sysex.

• trademark FM digital sound;
• velocity and aftertouch make this keyboard very expressive;
• hundreds (even thousands) of sounds available on the Internet;
• still a workhorse after 20+ years

available at www.yamaha.com

This may be the biggest, most content-laden freebie ever to come your way. If you have an appetite for FM synth patches, it had better be a very big appetite.

by David Baer, Jan. 2019

This month’s freebie has been around for quite some time, but I was recently motivated to explore the availability of free FM patches on the web and immediately came across it. A number of FM softsynths have the ability to import patch banks in the form of SYSEX files that were originally created for the venerable Yamaha DX7. The list of such instruments reportedly includes (but may not be limited to):

• Arturia DX7 V
• Native Instruments FM8 (and FM7 before it)
• FL Studio Sytrus
• Big Tick Rhino
• Loftsoft FM Heaven
• Audio Nebula Aurora
• Speedsoft VX7 (Free)
• Digital Suburban Dexed (Free)

Although I’ve had FM8, Sytrus and Rhino sitting on my DAW for years now, it was the acquisition of Arturia’s DX7 V (as part of a very nice Christmas present) that motivated me to look for something I knew to be readily available: a freely downloadable collection of DX7-compatible FM patches. Boy, did I come across a whopper! No doubt, this is not the only collection of FM patches available for free download, but once I found it, I felt no incentive to look any further.

The collection is contained in the file DX7_AllTheWeb.zip, found here:

How many patches are in the file? I hesitate to even estimate, but here’s the lowdown. In this zip file we have nearly 12,600 files that unzipped occupy a healthy 34 M of disk space. Each of those files is a DX7 bank which may contain (and usually does contain) 32 patches. You can do the math. Below are the directory names of the top level:

Now, even with a measly thousand FM patches, you are probably going to rapidly realize that there’s a lot of duplication, even if none of the patches are precisely identical. FM patches tend to fall into a modest number of predictable categories: FM pianos, bells, clavs, mallets, etc. So do you really need a collection of patches, the count of which may be a six-figure number? I suspect not.

Even worse, of course, is that none of these will be tagged, assuming your virtual FM synth has a browser that supports tagging in the first place. So, how to find a good FM Rhodes sound, for example? If the patch name has “Rhodes” in it, you have a decent chance of success. If a patch is called “TickleMyIvories” or “BlackAndWhite”, we are in needle-in-a-haystack territory.

So, let me suggest that a way to approach this dilemma is to take a few minutes every day to import just one or two of the 12,000+ SYSEX files, find a couple of presets you like, and save them in a Favorites folder, appropriately tagged if your instrument’s browser supports tagging. I very much suspect you will feel that you’ve reached a point of saturation long before you get through the entire collection.

But, there are some really great sounds here, even if it might take a little effort to track them down. Many of these banks were at one time commercial offerings. The person who assembled the collection and who goes by the name “Bobby Blues” on the web site (OK, it actually might be his real name I suppose), is very up front about the possibility of the unwanted appropriation of someone’s intellectual property. He states this (quoted verbatim from the web page):

Dx7 Patches For Dexed

I gathered here in a zipped (*.zip) folder hundreds of DX7 soundbanks (sysex format only) that I gleaned through the years by surfing on the Net. Sorry, I did not sort it out, you’ll certainly find several duplicates in it. But you’ll also have access to hundreds of sounds to “feed” your favorite synth. As I downloaded all these soundbanks for free in the past, I may consider it as public domain material. Now, if you are the owner of one or several of these soundbanks and you do not agree that they are available on this page, please inform me via e-mail, and I’ll retire it immediately.

So, you can probably use this collection guilt free. This is all fairly old material and is realistically of little current commercial value in any case. So, have fun and enjoy the no-cost bounty. Thanks for your efforts, Mr. Blues – very much appreciated!

Dx7 Patches On Modx