That;s it for the evening...

Off to check email and then to bed. Long day tomorrow - lots of office work and then an acupuncture session. A member of an email list is selling me an older piece of music synthesizer technology so looking forward to playing with that. Back in 1983, Yamaha released the DX7 music synthesizer -- this was the first commercial all-digital synth and it used a Frequency Modulation Synthesis technique developed by John Chowning at Stanford University. Yamaha sold over 160K of them. These were a full keyboard instrument. Later, Yamaha released a few synth modules based on the FM Synthesis design. I own two TX81Zs and love them for some very specific sounds but they are fairly limited in what they can do. The unit I am buying is a TX816 which is eight full DX7's with full MIDI control and individual outputs for each channel. I have played with these before and it is a monster. One very cool tweak is to very slightly detune the individual modules and to use a very low frequency operator to vary the tuning on a few of them. You get an incredibly lush choral effect that it very difficult to duplicate without a much larger compliment of equipment. Back in the 80's and 90's, the sound of the presets became clich� but now people have forgotten and all is new again. Looking forward to the new toy!