Micro Memories
Once it was activated, though,
how did the synthesizer sound? Pretty
good, actually — it was capable of
very high quality sounds. (They were
very clear and bright, though. I found
that I needed to warm many of
them up by running them through
chorus effects, phasers, and flangers
to get sounds that “sat” in recordings
better.)
Like its big brother — the DX7 —
the CX5M was especially good at
mimicking tones that already had a
bell-like quality to them: there were
great electric piano, tubular bell,
xylophone, and glockenspiel sounds.
Another early cartridge for the
CX5M was catalog number YRM-103,
their DX7 voicing program. It was
designed to simplify the programming of Yamaha’s then-flagship DX7
synthesizer — a daunting task for
even the most experienced electronic
musician.
Eventually — and I’ll bet I wasn’t
alone — I simply ended up using
the computer’s synthesizer almost
exclusively and playing it in real time
on recordings. Like I said, you couldn’t
program it — but it sure sounded
pretty good when you played it.
Also, just as with the DX7, repro-gramming the synthesizer in the
CX5M for new sounds was extremely
difficult and I suspect that — just
as with the DX7 — most musicians
Programming
Nightmare
The problem was that it was a
bear to program these sounds — both
programming new sounds and
programming compositions based on
those sounds. One of the first
cartridges that Yamaha introduced
for the CX5M was the YRM-101 FM
Music Composer software, which
allowed for writing scores on a staff-like interface on the screen.
As I recall, it didn’t allow for
much — if any — recording of real
time playing, so everything had to
be entered via the keyboard — a
daunting task.
MIDI was a relatively new concept when the CX5M debuted, having
only been developed by Roland,
Oberheim, Sequential Circuits, and
other musical electronics manufacturers beginning in 1981. However, it
was well established enough by 1985
that the CX5M came equipped with
MIDI in and out jacks. I recall mating
the unit to my Roland TR-707 drum
machine and using the CX5M to sync
up drums with compositions I wrote
using the Music Composer cartridge
and recording both the CX5M and the
drum machine simultaneously to my
four-track cassette recorder (not
exactly Vangelis or Peter Gabriel
territory, but you have to start
somewhere and, remember, this was
pretty much the state of home music
recording in 1986).
JANUARY 2005
9
