About The Sy77: Afm And Awm Voices - Yamaha SY77 Operating Manual

About the SY77: AFM and AWM voices

The SY77 produces sound using two proprietary Yamaha technologies; Advanced Frequency Modulation
(AFM) synthesis and Advanced Wave Memory (AWM). A special Drum Voice assigns a different AWM
percussion sound to each note of the keyboard.
AFM — Advanced
Frequency Modulation
AWM — Advanced Wave
Memory
A voice consists of one
two or four Elements
12
Frequency Modulation (FM) is a patented Yamaha technology for producing
complex and musical controllable sounds, and was first made famous by the DX7
synthesizer. The SY77's Advanced FM (AFM) takes FM synthesis to new
levels of realism, expression, and programmability.
Each of the six FM operators in the SY77 can use one of 16 different wave-
forms, and be connected to each other in 45 basic algorithms (patterns). In addi-
tion, each operator has two inputs which can be modulated by feedback from any
other operator, from a noise generator, or from an AWM sample. Compared to
previous FM instruments, many parameters have a wider range of control, and
the SY77 envelope generators have six segments. with looping.
AFM can produce sounds that change dramatically in response to your
playing, allowing a wide range of expressiveness.
Advanced Wave Memory (AWM) is a patented Yamaha technology for storing
and reproducing digital sound. The SY77 contains 2 Mwords (4 Mbytes) of
AWM samples in Read Only Memory (ROM), including piano, strings, choir,
and percussive sounds among many others. Optional cards can be inserted into
the front panel
WAVEFORM
are sampled in 16-bit linear format with a maximum sampling frequency
of 48 kHz.
AWM sounds are high-quality digital recordings of actual instruments.
Each sound that you have been playing from the SY77's keyboard is defined as
a Voice, and consists of one two or four Elements. (The drum voice explained
below is a special case.) Each of these elements is actually the equivalent of an
independent synthesizer; either AFM or AWM.
An element can be set to produce sound for only a specific range of the key-
board, or for a specific range of velocities. This allows you to create a voice
which produces different sounds for different ranges of the keyboard, or for loudly
or softly played notes.
Key
Velocity
127
Element 1:
slot to make additional sounds available. The sounds
Element 2: Element 3:
Key
Pitch
G-8
Element 4: