The Yamaha SY-22 produces its sounds by combining simple 2-op FM parts and samples. You can have one FM part and one sample sound, or two of both kind. These sounds can be mixed with the onboard joystick in realtime, you can even record and playback the joystick movements, which gives really fine evolving and changing patches! Drawbacks of this synth are:
* Only _one_ drumkit, with fixed assignment of sounds to keys (no standard).
* No filter of any kind...
* Rather simplistic and "metallic" sounding effects.
* Small display (2*16 char. LCD + 2 digit LED) - lots of edit pages...
Good things:
* Real time (and recordable) vector control of the soundmix and variable detuning!
* 8 part multitimbral
* you can also stack voices on the same MIDI channel for fatter sounds)
* Great evolving sounds!
* Velocity and Aftertouch sensitive.
Overall quite a good little synth. (IMHO :-)
Released: 1990 | 
