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My first, and until recently only, non-analog. I got it because I was fascinated by the math behind FM, but forget the math, this thing makes music. The keyboard is nice (although I'm not a real keybaord player so don't believe me), the three control wheels have a very nice feel (although I miss ribbon controllers), the sounds are great (well, until you start hitting the high notes where the digital aliasing can make things unpleasant if you're not careful), and the variety of sounds is overwhelming. I even like the filters, and I own four analogs for comparison. You can set up a patch so you can control the filter cutoff in realtime with a mod wheel just like an analog, or you can play it in edit mode and tweak voice parameters on the fly. If it had oscillator sync I might be able to throw away one or two analogs. Not that I would though.
The voice architecture is complex, the voices can be a bit tedious to edit, and I've only made maybe five voices (out of hundreds) that I'm really proud of, but that's no problem because there is a vast number of voices to download, both SY77-specific voices that take advantage of all the features and converted DX7 voices. The sounds people get out of this thing amaze me; I feel I know it pretty well but I'm always hearing something that makes me wonder how they did it and learning new tricks.
Don't buy it for the sequencer (get a computer), drums (get a drum machine), or the LCD backlighting. Do buy it for anything else, including industrial, dance, jazz, new age, porno soundtracks, etc.
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