RE: VFX vs. SY77/SY99

>Paul, you must be confusing the SY77/SY99 with some other Yamaha SY
synths.
>Not all of them were FM based, some were wavetable only like the VFX.
Any
>wavetable synth is timbrally quantized. They're limited to filtering
and
>mixing of the prerecorded timbres, while FM synthesis creates
harmonically
>rich spectra by frequency modulation of sine or more complex waves.

The Yamaha (the one at Yale's CSMT, Adam Silverman should be able to
tell us which one) did have FM capabilities. However, I didn't think of
that as "synthesis from scratch." Looking back at Gary's query, however,
I see that he would indeed qualify it.

>The sample playback side of the Yamaha does include a bunch of
>synthetic waveforms, but Gary was more interested in the FM synthesis
>side, which uses oscillators (sine wave and variants) as raw material
>for cooking up much more complex sounds.

Yamaha's synthetic waveforms are themselves FM-based, and can be used to
FM one another.