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I long admired the Yamaha TG-77 is very for its programming power and when one came up for sale locally, I knew I had to have it. I spent all first week programming it and by the end of the second one, I began to feel a bit frustrated - the bugger was supposed to sound fabulous...but it simply wouldn't. I couldn't understand what I was doing wrong - I grasped the concept of AFM and the AWM was a no-brainer. When it was time to combine the two into a cohesive unit together with all that LFO's, filters, and effects, however, the results I was getting were truly underwhelming.
So, after a few months and very few remarkable patches, I had to admit to myself once again that I'm simply not good enough of a programmer for this synth. To make the most of it, you literally have to spend hours with it, preferably using a computer editor as you're likely to go mad programming it from the front panel. This synth can do almost everything, but it takes quite a while to get there unless you're a programming genius. If you take your time and don't get scared off by the very steep learning curve, you have a good chance of unleashing and subequently harnessing the power of one of the most advanced digital synths of all time. Yes, even a good decade after it was released.
As a programmer's workhorse, you thus can't go wrong with the TG77. It features excellent MIDI implementation, I never ran out of polyphony, the software does not crash and it never lost any data. Furthermore, it's extremely well built and very reliable, except for the display backlight, but quality replacements are available at a reasonable price. If you have any futher questions, or if you want to hear it in action - it is featured in several of my songs - please drop me a line at sartre@siol.net
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