Fantasia patch for DX11/TX81Z/V50

[commodorejohn]

Just for kicks the other day, I got to trying to roll up a patch on my Yamaha V50 recreating the immortal "Fantasia" preset from the Roland D50. There's a handful of different mimicries out there in the assorted public-domain banks, but a lot of them sound terrible, and even the ones that sound nice are only loose imitations - but the D-50 soundbank for DX7-II years ago proved that FM can do surprisingly close approximations of some of its characteristic sounds, it's just a matter of careful planning and analysis. The subtractive pad tone was dead easy; the bell part took a lot more finagling to get it anything close to right, and in the end it mostly came down to trial-and-error comparison against the genuine article.

(I'm very curious about what I ended up at - operator ratios of 5.2:8.2 C:M - because that works out to a ratio of 26:41, which is super prime-y for what on the D-50 is just a simple cyclic "spectrum" waveform with the fundamental removed, but damned if it didn't sound a whole lot closer to right than the more obvious setting of 5:8. But since there doesn't seem to be a dump of the D-50's PCM ROM out there as far as I can tell, it's a mystery to me...)

It's definitely not perfect - the chime part loses something in the lower range for reasons I'm not clear on, and without the D-50's lush effects it's noticeably thinner. But I'm happy with how close I got to the overall timbre(s), and when you layer it up a few times over and detune a bit (or just run it through an outboard chorus,) it gets a lot closer

SysEx attached - it's a single-voice V50 transmit dump, which should also be compatible with the DX11 and TX81Z.

[adam]

how about some audio?

[commodorejohn]

Well all right then A quick A/B/B~ comparison:

Listening to it directly side-by-side like this, there's a lot more that needs to be addressed than I thought. In particular, I didn't realize how over-prominent and long-decay I made the chime compared to the original; velocity response needs a lot of tweaking as well, plus I never even looked into aftertouch response.

Still, not too bad, I think...