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Ahh, Man this was my first ever encounter with a synthesizer. We had one at school and I remember groping around on the front panel trying to find the power on switch when it was hiding at the back!
So I never owned this synth, but made the most use of it in the music group at school, almost eight years ago now. It was a great instrument and sounded better (and most definitely was better) than anything else we had in the school at the time. Ever since I played the SY55 I wanted some sort of synth like it. It looked great and it sounded great. I seem to remember that my favourite program was the pick bass (#32) and there was a cool electric piano-type sound called 'Elektrodes' and had a sharp, shiny cutting edge. Some of the synth brass sounds were cool as well.
We had the synth plugged into an Atari at the time, running Steinberg's Notator. It did a good job and I wrote about three compositions with the synth for my coursework (Grade A-star by the way!).
I guess the usual gripes would be the lack of a backlight in the display, and the actual display itself was tiny like on the DX7. It displayed what was needed though and no backlight means no worry of bulbs burning out.
I never programmed the SY55. I knew nothing of synthesizer programming at the time. I don't think I even realised it was programmamble. At the time I was only 14 turning 15, a synth to me was simply some huge black thing with no speakers and had to be made out of metal - and oh yeah, it had to sound cool and make synth sounds!
From what I can remember the piano sound was rather like the SY77. I was never really that impressed by it, and also thought the strings sounded too "home keyboard-ey", but organ sounds, synth sounds and basses were definitely very much in. I also remember a patch called VCO lead, which was very cool.
One last good thing. SY55 is well made but at the same time rather small and very portable, probably not much larger than Korg's X5 - just a little deeper from front to back.
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