Note: SY77 Retube is no longer available. It ran on Macs in OS 7-9
and directly edited the SY77 format floppy disks. Since modern Macs
don’t come with floppy drives and reports are that third party floppy drives for
OS X Macs will not read the SY77 disks, it didn’t make sense to port it to OS X.
Also, most SY77s have had their own floppy drives fail over the years, although
sometimes replacements can be found. SY77 Retube for some reason does not run in the
Classic environment in OS X either. Sorry.
Who would need SY77Retube?
SY77Retube is a simple, unrefined, very specialized widget. It is only of interest
to people who have a Yamaha SY77 synthesizer and who are interested in tuning and/or
using controllers to play expressively. Be warned that this program is ROUGH.
It doesn’t do a whole lot of error checking and can sometimes freeze up if you try to
switch to another program while running it. But it can still work wonders! Still, there
are no guarantees. This program is AS IS. Use at your own risk.
Why did you make SY77Retube?
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Although Yamaha calls each instrument a ‘voice’, I use the more common term ‘patch’.
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There are thousands of SY77 patch banks floating around out there, as well as tens of
thousands of Yamaha DX7 patches that have been converted to SY77 format. Unfortunately,
most all of these banks have every patch set up with 12 tone equal temperament as the
tuning. This means that you have to load the bank, upload your alternate tunings,
then
go through
every patch voice individually... heading to edit page #221 and separately
turning on microtuning for each of the 1 to 4 voice elements and then selecting the tuning.
Dude, like, what a drag!!
Then you can re-save that one patch. Do that 63 more times and now you’re done
with one bank! Goodness Gracious!!!
Start over again with the
next bank and sometime in a hundred years you’ll be done.
Why not just kill me now and get it over with!
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It’s also desirable to have some controllers routed and connected when
auditioning banks of converted DX7 patches. Many of these banks contain patches that were
designed with non-zero amplitude modulation sensitivity (AMS) on some operators, which usually
means that the patch expects to have some controller routed to EG Bias. DX7 to SY77
conversion programs do not copy function data (separate from patch data) where the
controller settings are, so this information is typically lost and the ability to
have that additional level of expressiveness in the converted patches goes unrealized.
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But it’s not over yet... next you find out
that hardly any of the patches have their controllers set up the way
that tickles your fancy — say with the foot pedal routed to filter cutoff, or the second
mod wheel routed to EG Bias or however it is you like it. This takes even longer to set up,
involving changes to edit pages #226, #227 and #228. Who can stand it? No one...
until now... until
the day has been SAVED with SY77Retube — the only widget that wrestles
an entire SY77 patch bank the way you like it in one easy fell sweep.
How to Use SY77Retube
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The SY77 has an on-board disk drive to
load and save patches, setups, and songs.
Since the SY77 uses 720k (double density) disks and writes a file directory which is
compatible with the IBM disk format, SY77 disk files can be read in any Macintosh with
System 7.5 or later, or which has the “PC Exchange” Control Panel.
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Start up the program. First SY77Retube allows you to select and read a SY77 file that
contains a patch bank.
Then SY77Retube displays a dialog window containing some synthesizer settings that
you can change and which will be applied to a selected set of patches in the bank:
Patch Range Selection
You select a range of patches using the popup menus
Range of Voices:First and
Range of Voices:Last.
These two menus each list all the patches in the bank.
This range comes up default as all 64 internal patches: A-1 through D-16.
Tuning Selection
You can then change the tuning of the patches by checking the
Tuning checkbox
to activate alternate tunings and then selecting the tuning using the
Scale popup menu. The first two entries in this popup show the names of the two internal
(editable) tunings. The rest are the names of all 64 of the Yamaha tuning presets.
Controller Routings
Up to four controller routings can be assigned. Each has a source controller, a level (0-127),
and a destination. Each destination can only be used once, but any source controller
can go to as many destinations as is desired.
The source can be any of the MIDI controller numbers from 0 to 120, or aftertouch.
The Source popup menu lists them by name for convenience (For example, controller #1 is the mod wheel
and controller #4 is the foot pedal.) This popup menu also allows you to select controllers
122 through 127 which are special controllers in the MIDI specification and should probably not
be used.
The level can be from 0 to 127.
The Destination popup menu can be set to any one of the following:
- Vibrato
- Tremolo
- Wah-wah
- Spin
- Filter
- Pan LFO Bias
- EG Bias
- Volume Low Limit
Greeting Message
When you first turn the SY77 on, a custom start up message is
displayed. It is convenient if this message includes information
about the patch bank and tuning currently loaded. To change the
message, you go to edit page #805 and start typing using the
12 button grid on the front of the SY77. If you have tried typing this way,
I doubt you were amused by the interface. To make this easier, the
text edit field in the upper right corner of SY77Retube allows you to type in
the message using your computer’s keyboard. Only the first twenty characters
will be kept since that is all that is allowed. Be careful not to
hit
Return while typing since that will close the dialog and
start the Voice Transformation Process.
Cancel or Transform
Once your settings are set up, press the
Transform button to alter the chosen settings.
You will then be prompted for a file name to save the file to.
A window will also open and print a bit of text describing how this patch bank is set up.
You can save this information and print it for a reference, or just ignore it.
If you press Cancel, the patch bank will not be altered but you will still get a text
window describing the bank, this time with the original settings of the bank.
Infusing Custom Tunings
Now that you have used SY77Retube to finagle your patch bank into being more usable,
you may need to cram one or two custom tunings into the file, if you plan to use tunings
that are more exotic than the presets.
You can also do this step before running SY77Retube over your patch bank file,
which may even be preferable since the tuning names in the popup menu will
then be correct.
How do you do such a thing? Well, SY77Retube is not a tuning editor.
But fortunately you are in luck since one is available that not only can retune
your instruments through a MIDI interface if you have one, but can also write directly
to SY77 native disk format. Li’l Miss’ Scale Oven
does that and a whole lot more. You can set up your tunings in a couple of ovens and then
do a Save As..., using the popup menu in the Save dialog to choose
SY Internal Tuning 1 or SY Internal Tuning 2 as your format, and selecting
the SY77 patch bank file you want to affect. You can do many files one after the other
with a single oven if you like. Just keep doing Save As....