jan hammer’s DX7 patches

Analog Days

The original Mahavishnu Orchestra - John McLaughlin (guitar), Jan Hammer (keyboards), Billy Cobham (drums), Jerry Goodman (violin), Rick Laird (bass)

On February 8, 1973, while on a high school band field trip to Babylon, NY, I saw an amazing band playing a live concert on TV (imagine that!) on a program called “In Concert.” That band turned out to be the Mahavishnu Orchestra, with John McLaughlin playing a double-necked electric guitar, Billy Cobham playing drums, and a keyboard player named Jan Hammer playing a synthesizer called a Minimoog. I was very impressed by the emotional energy of this music, and didn’t realize it at the time, but this discovery of Jan (who I had heard before but was not yet listening to regularly) would be a watershed moment in my life.

Jan playing his custom Probe (designed by Roger Powell). Jan’s Probe was the 1st synth to feature a “whammy bar, ” which was a small spring-loaded lever controlled with the left pinky finger.

A jam Jan did with Tony Williams (drummer) around 1978. This is just the two of them.

Jan Hammer’s amazing playing is often compared to electric guitar. He often sounds like an electric guitar but different, in a good way. Of course, just as guitars can do many things synths cannot, the reverse is also true, and a good player will take advantage of these things to produce unique and original music.

The synthesizer solo on this piece displays the extreme virtuosity of Jan’s synth technique… Note Jan’s vibrato (1:03) which, unlike almost all other synth-players, is performed with the pitch-bender rather than a robotic modulation wheel, then Jan modulates the VCA envelope to a stacatto while playing (1:46), and soon returns to legato (2:00) and brings in overtones with the pedal using his signature oscillator sync sweep. How does he do this while playing? I don’t know! (left-hand?) At (2:44) he drops a chord with his “whammy bar” (a custom finger-controller on his unique Probe synth). All analog.

Since the mid-seventies, I’ve considered Jan Hammer to be the best synthesizer player of all time. Jan has gone through various musical changes during his long and storied career, and the 1970’s through the 80’s is my favorite period for his music. From the early seventies and into the mid-80’s, he used primarily analog hardware, such as Moog and Oberheim synthesizers, to produce his famous guitar-like expressive sounds. Some time I should write another post about his analog days, along with his custom Powell Probe synth controller and the truly unique playing techniques he had developed by that time, but that’s for another day…

Beginning in the late 80’s, and characterized by his TV scores for the program Miami Vice, he increasingly used digital FM synthesis (Yamaha DX) and samplers such as the Fairlight CMI, in addition to analog stuff. He began a partial shift to the new digital FM synthesis that was becoming popular with the Yamaha DX7 keyboard. Though the Miami Vice Theme (the last fully instrumental piece to ever make No. 1 on the Billboard Charts) used Jan’s signature analog sync sweep techniques for that guitar sound, Miami Vice would just as often as not use the new digital FM sound (a variation of the “Jazz Guitar” patch from the Yamaha DX7).

The “guitar” solo on the Miami Vice Theme was played on a polyphonic analog synth, unlike most of the rest of the “guitar” solos which soon followed, played on the Yamaha DX7

Digital Days

Rum Cay uses the DX7 Activate patch, though it’s toned down in the attack a bit.

Like most FM synthesizers, the Yamaha DX7 had a bright, dynamic sound that was amazing, and that analog synths could not produce. But the new synths were a beast to program, so most keyboardists simply used the preset sounds, which were fantastic enough. Among the much-used presets were Rhodes electric piano emulations, which are heard on probably most music of the late 80’s. A much more obscure patch, which is now a bit difficult to find, was called “Activate.” Jan used this patch on his piece “Rum Cay.” It features a VERY dynamic attack. Very few, if any, software emulations today can accurately play this patch (this is the case for the very dynamic FM patches, including the “Jazz Guitar” patch). If I load either of these patches into Native Instruments FM synth, they sound mushy and lifeless. When I load them into my old Yamaha TX-802 rackmount hardware synth, they sound synthtastic.

The “guitar” solo on “Rain” is from the Yamaha DX7 “Jazz Guitar” patch.

Here’s a piece I wrote a few years ago using the “Activate” patch. This one though is actually a soundfont file I created using DXulator, and played by a software synth! Other than the drums, it’s entirely the Activate patch, used on both bass and lead. So, it seems you CAN produce these dynamic FM sounds in software. If you play around with this patch, you soon realize that Hammer must have toned it down quite a bit for his mellow “Rum Cay.” One way he might have done this is by limiting the upper end of the attack dynamic by scaling the midi velocity down so he couldn’t push that attack too far. If I do this, the patch does sound more like Rum Cay.

Below is a link to a sysex file “Hammer.syx,” containing original patches for Yamaha DX synths of that era, including “Jazz Guitar” and “Activate.” This collection is my own, and it contains patches that were either used in Miami Vice soundtracks or sound like they might or should have been. I’ve also included a separate syx file just for the difficult-to-find activate patch.

.syx files can be loaded directly into most FM hardware and software synths.

.dxm files are used by “DX Manager,” which is my favorite DX patch management program. Jon Morgan created a couple of programs you can demo that will enable advanced management of patches for pretty much any Yamaha FM synth. I use it primarily to re-organize favorite patches, and to switch between them using my computer while playing my TX-802 rack-mount synth. For a small fee, you can own a permanent license which includes all future updates to the software. Highly recommended. http://www.fm-alive.com

Here are three dxm files with some of my favorite DX patches (including Hammer.dxm):