FM Skies
By NickLong on March 28, 2026 10:35 pm
For this weeks weekly beats the challenge was to do a track entirely with the Yamaha DX7 (Or the Arturia emulation of it). This followed on from my previous challenge of using only the Roland D-50 it seemed only fair as they were bitter rivals.
I decided to make a UK Garage type track purely because I haven't made one for a while and I think the clean FM sounds of the DX7 suits the genre really well (MJ Cole used a Yamaha in the studio). I made heavy use of the super cliche Lately Bass, Organ and E-Piano patches which were in a huge percentage of 80's radio hits to hammer the DX7 vibes home.
Unlike other weeks I didn't set myself a challenge to use crazy scales or chords so this one is in C Lydian and is pretty diatonic. I'm using a high F# on every chord as an upper extension to bash home the Lydian feel, but other than that it's all very basic chords.
The other challenge was to make a track with the Synthesizer V vocal synth as I've had it for a while and used it very little for completed tracks. I'm using the Solaria voice print which seems to be better than the default voices although like all of them it's a little bit musical theatre. The vocals sometimes lapse into someone auditioning for Frozen the musical.
I added a bit of Minimal Audio Evoke to give it a bit of hard tuned robot sheen.
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Love the vibe here as well. Can’t go wrong with a DX7 