<-- Look what I found in my junk!
The UK DX-Owners Club was started in 1984 by Tony Wride. This document contains whatever I have left from the club’s newsletters. I have kept the JPG scans intact and also appended the text versions as well.
The DX-OC newsletter was basically printed on both sides of A4 paper which was folded in half. This means a 12-page newsletter was basically made of only 3 sheets of A4 paper. At the time, most of the contents were dedicated to DX-7 voice patches and, as such, I think the articles which are contained herein represents most of what was actually written.
The pages I have are arranged into 5 parts containing:
I am pretty sure I have arranged them in the correct order, chronologically.
I was going to write a proper introduction, and then I realised I had already written one long ago (when my memory was better). From my yala.freeservers.com/t2dx-fm.htm website:-
As luck would have it, I have just managed to contact Tony Wride and he has given his blessing for this “reprint” of his writings.
Please enjoy the articles provided
The F.M. legend - a personal history
For me, it all started one day in mid'1984 when I walked into my friendly neighbourhood music-inst shop (actually, it was Soho Soundhouse, London) and there was a buzz in the air. The sales-guy says "You're here to try out the DX-7, right?". I, of course, didn't know what he was talking about and enquired about the price. It was out of my reach (obviously). Not to be deterred, the sales-guy instead plonks me in front of a Yamaha DX-9 and hands me some headphones. I started playing and... aaaahh, heaven! It's hard to describe what I heard (bearing in mind it's my first time hearing F.M. synthesis). You have to understand that, up to this point, synths were all about strings and brass. Occasionally, you'd have a few plinky plonky xylo-sounds (heck, the MKS-10 was considered realistic) but percussives, vibes, pianos etc were elusive (ie non-existent). But right there in front of me, in the form of a DX-9, was the holy grail. And, to make matters worse, there weren't any knobs or sliders or anything in fact which gave any inkling as to how this synth worked. I was hooked! I took the plunge and bought a DX-7 in Nov'84 and later a CX-5 in Jan'85. Unfortunately, programming these FM synths was an absolute nightmare. Nothing was fast and nothing was easy. It really wasn't intuitive at all and the manual wasn't exactly that helpful. But I was determined to master this beast. Learning to program the DX-7 was a slow and tedious process. But one day in late 1984, humanity was saved by a fellow synth-enthusiast called Tony Wride. Fed-up and tired with struggling alone with his DX-7, he mooted the idea of a "DX-club" in a letter to the magazine "Electronics & Music Maker". This caused a huge stirring of support from the public (DX synth owners), the media (music mags) and Yamaha too. Thus was born the DX-Owners Club. It was the DX-Owners Club which took FM programming to new heights. Via its newsletter, we began sharing patches/ sounds (one patch called "Wurlitzer" was really popular) and programming techniques (excellent articles by Ken Campbell). Part of Tony Wride's vision was also to have a network of co-ordinators who anyone could telephone for help and advice (you'll find listed under Area Co-ordinator for London W2 is "Yahaya 01-221-5314" which is me). Beyond the popular newsletter (these typed-up/ hand-drawn photocopy newsletters were inspirational), the club also organised get-together seminars bringing programmers together to meet experts like Dave Bristow to discuss FM in depth (I remember that fixed-frequency operators was a big topic). FM ruled and the DX-7 was king... Life was good! But as life goes on, reality takes its hold... Tony's job in the Royal Navy gave him less time to run the club. Eventually, the club was handed over to (surprise surprise) Yamaha who appointed Martin Tennant (not to be confused with Martin Russ) to run the re-named X-Series Owners Club. With Yamaha's backing (ie money), the newsletter became a regular magazine (with pictures and all) and everything was taken to a more polished level. The X-Series Owners Club was good... but with the change of management of the club, came a change in objectivity. You see, us members may all be dx-synth enthusiasts but we didn't work for Yamaha (the old newsletter would include info on non-Yamaha products as well). I remember an interesting session where Yamaha was launching their DX-5 while Tony was happily proposing to just add a TX-7 to a DX-7 (ie half the cost). Ah, well! Nevermind. As far as I know, the magazine continued until around mid'1987.You can view the whole document here DX-OC 1984 PDF from Google Drive.