Here are the DX7 patches I made back in the day. I almost feel bad for releasing them as CC-BY-SA 4.0 (which I am hereby doing) because they feel so personal; the good ones that is. Some of them are unusably bad to the point that I don’t know why I kept them, but weepfriend is the quintessential Idiomdrottning sound, ghostknock is great for minor chords, and mellanchor can add its characteristics to a song♥︎ And there are a handful that I don’t remember using but that do inspire me now—like snotty (uh, you can rename these patches if you want).
Please enjoy them♥︎
When I was in a band I didn’t know how to make music. I just wrote the lyrics, sometimes hummed a melody. The keyboardist in our band used and loved a DX7, both as a midi keyboard (it’s fantastic) and (more often) as an instrument in its own right. When the venue had a piano we’d use that instead, but, he did like the DX7 and he would talk about famous songs where it was used or mentioned in lyrics.
Two years or so after the band’s dissolution, I went to a PureData workshop and the demo exercise was a simple one-operator FM synth. A few weeks after that, I visited Kymatica in his studio and he taught me how to make patches on the TX7. We spent a full day in his studio making patches (I didn’t save any of them, it was just to learn). (Reading about it now, it seems like you can’t make patches directly on TX7 but looking at photos of the PR-7 separate programming unit, that looks familiar.)
I had Hexter at home so I could start making patches right away. At first I used txedit which was a TUI app that had the huge drawback that I never figured out how to load existing patches—every single sound had to be made from scratch and I had to get it right or I’d never be able to edit it. Nowaways Hexter has a patch editing mode which I use instead—because I can actually edit and start from existing patches.♥︎
Long story short, these were all made for and tested with Hexter rather than the original.