Yamaha MOXF8's 700MB soundbank, ... what is their secret?

[avasopht]

Okay so Yamaha's MOXF8 features a whopping 700MB of sounds!!

Whoop tee doo.

Now you've all calmed down from the ravenous applause of such a large sound bank, I'm curious as to how they are able to do so much with so little. I mean, we all know that the attack transient carries the most sonic information, while the sustain and release of acoustic instruments can be much more easily synthesized convincingly than the attack. So maybe it's just a matter of synthesizing the rest of the sound through graintables, keeping the memory footprint as low as possible.

But is that it? or are there some other tricks we need to be aware of?

[mcatalao]

It's something like that. I think the MOTIF uses the AWM synth method. The principle is around a long time, almost every yamaha keyboard used that in the last 20 years or so. Even my old PSR 400 used that.

It's essentially samples as generators/operators, and the rest is more or less similar to a normal synth. I guess a lot of synthlike Re's are inspired on that, but you can also see that in Vecto and so forth. It's not actually the same as Wavetable synthesis, where only one cicle wave sounds are used.

Korg and Roland have essentially the same method of synthesis (half sampling half synthesis). It also has some additive concepts, where you can layer multiple sounds and create combis much like in reason but you record the patches as one. I really don't know more but my old XP10 worked like this. Man, i don't miss those times with 2 inch monochrome leds tor program synths...