This DX7 Cartridge Does Not Exist

First of all, fantastic tool.<p>Second of all, to folks that are trying to figure out how to give this a go: Open up your favorite DAW (try out Reaper[1] if you don&#x27;t have one yet), download an install the fantastic open source DX7 emulator plugin Dexed VST plugin [2] and have fun.<p>In my opinion, FM synthesis is one of the finest things in life I&#x27;ve ever experienced. I never understood the whole culture around an emotional attachment to one&#x27;s guitar before I realized how closely I could bond with my FM synthesis instruments. It was about five years ago when it started to feel a bit more like an extension of my brain and less like a tool. Now, I&#x27;ve always been an FM8 person myself because of the envelopes, but obviously the DX7 shaped synthesizers have the superior library.<p>I&#x27;m always overjoyed to see projects that get more folks into the joy of music with FM synthesis.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reaper.fm&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reaper.fm&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asb2m10.github.io&#x2F;dexed&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asb2m10.github.io&#x2F;dexed&#x2F;</a>

Can someone give me a short explanation as to what this is and why it is significant?<p>It looks quite interesting. I am basically looking for the ELI5 because I have never heard of a DX7 before and I don&#x27;t know what the file that I was prompted to download was about.

This is very cool, well done!<p>I wonder how far we are away from the following:<p>1. Being able to use a GAN to be able to give a synth an input sound (i.e. a reece sound from a dnb track) and have it generate a patch that matches it.<p>2. Being able to do 1 but apply it to a whole Ableton project. The interesting thing about Ableton is that they&#x27;re actually XML files under the covers.<p>Even if you couldn&#x27;t get close, it would be fascinating to see how an AI would design synth patches for subtractive synths.

I have KQ Dixie on this iPad Pro that I&#x27;m presently on. The sysex files generated by this website opened up directly into it, and it worked brilliantly. This is so cool. There&#x27;s a lot of duds, but it also generates some very usable patches.<p>I actually have a DX7 sitting on my desk at work, although I only use it as a MIDI keyboard because I love the keybed. Dexed or Arturia is so much easier to program, and 100% the same audio, so I have no reason to mess around programming the real thing. When I did play it directly, I programmed it in Dexed anyway.

Just loaded mine into my Arturia DX7 VST, and its rad. Threw some juicy reverb after it, and found a couple patches in my pack that will defintely be putting into a track.

Very neat. I refurbish&#x2F;repair DX7&#x27;s as a hobby, and it is always surprising to me how much life there is still left in that synth. There is a whole eco-system around them and lots of people still want the actual thing to play on. They&#x27;re also built like tanks which is one reason they are still so much in use today.

Years ago I had a TX81Z synthesizer unit. It was a rack mount unit (not a keyboard synthesizer; you had to use it with a midi keyboard). It was also an FM synthesizer with a fundamental difference; the DX7 used sine waves modulating each other to produce the sounds, and the TX81Z let you do the frequency modulation with sine waves, or triangle waves, or square waves, or pulse waves. You basically had an order of magnitude more flexibility in creating sounds, and an order of magnitude more difficulty. Some people were able to create some really interesting patches, but I never got good enough to create anything remotely interesting.

I downloaded a .syx and loaded it into Dexed. About half the patches don&#x27;t make any sound, but the ones that remain are pretty good. Various classic FM sounds in the Sonic the Hedgehog vein.

Reminds me of the Yanaha CX5 MSX computer <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.msx.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Yamaha_CX5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.msx.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Yamaha_CX5</a>

This is ultimate vaporwave thing.<p>It needs just two things:<p>1) some sanity checking on presets (to drop not working sounds) 2) javascript player on the page (there is web port of DEXED[1])<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.webaudiomodules.org&#x2F;wamsynths&#x2F;dexed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.webaudiomodules.org&#x2F;wamsynths&#x2F;dexed</a>

I sorta wonder if this can be generalized to, say, some number of oscillators (i.e. if there&#x27;s three in the synth then extra three in the model are considered disabled and we have a subspace of parameters), and to a bunch of common parameters like wave shapes, ADSR, the algo, the LFO. Because I noticed DX7 patches available on the web, but my particular DAW ain&#x27;t got six oscillators and I can&#x27;t even imagine what to do with that many of them.<p>(Though personally I don&#x27;t believe that we should accelerate the exhaustive search on the musical space, but the geek in me can&#x27;t help pondering about this.)

Well, I have to say:<p>(1) This looks interesting. I had no idea any of this existed.<p>(2) For the level of awesome, this is the worst-documented ecosystem I&#x27;ve stepped into in a long while. I hope some random user volunteers to make really nice documentation at some point. This could go from awesome to a lot awesomer.<p>I looked for MIDI synthesizer a while back, and never ran into dexed. I suspect I&#x27;ll have a lot of fun with this at some point.

I really want to like Dexed (I love FM synthesis). But (I&#x27;m using it on a Mac, if that makes any difference):<p>• After clicking on a knob, I should then be able to use the up and down arrow keys to move the value up and down.<p>• I should be able to type in the numeric value I want a selected parameter to be.<p>If the interface had these two features, it would be perfect. Without them, for me, it is unusable for programming sounds.

Awesome! I tried to do this for my final year project back in 2018 but failed miserably. To the author: well done, this is really cool!

It .. asks me to download something when I click generate.<p>Is that supposed to happen?<p>Running: Firefox: 76.0.1 (64 bit)<p>I thought it was going to be a picture of the cartridge.

Cool idea ! Will definitely test the results , thanks a lot ! Here’s something similar : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;u-he.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;protoverb&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;u-he.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;protoverb&#x2F;</a>

Really works well. Downloaded the SysEx imported into NI&#x27;s FM8 and some of the sounds are extremely usable as the basis for some sound design.<p>You milage may vary if you are after some traditional sounds though - I am definitely not.

This is so cool. I recently got myself a Reface DX to recapture the feel of the original DX7 and have Dexed on my machines (including the iPad), so will be having some fun over the next few evenings.

My dad bought a DX7 when I was a kid. This sure bring back some good memories!

wow really nice! will try it later. that topic made me join to do my first comment on HN lol. I wonder if there are many music producers around here? would be nice to exchange some ideas :)

absolutely love when hn has audio related content. Thank you for sharing this, I will use this with dexed next time I&#x27;m horsing around with sound design.

Really really cool. Can’t wait to try this out.

404

&gt; <i>Do you want to allow downloads on “www.thisdx7cartdoesnotexist.com”?</i><p>Nope.

I had no idea what a DX7 cartridge was, but out of curiosity I clicked the &quot;Click here to generate&quot; link. It immediately downloaded a file.<p>I&#x27;m sure you have no malicious intent here, but my immediate reaction was that it&#x27;s a virus or something bad. I immediately deleted the file. The experience felt like one of those scammy popups that initiates a download.<p>You should really put a label or something to indicate to the user that clicking the link is going to download something.