YouTube Uploaded by jbfairlight on Nov 12, 2011
"The Digital Keyboards, Inc Synergy synthesizer was manufactured from 1982 to 1985.
It is estimated that probably less than 100 (of the 700-800 serie I, II and II+ originally made) are still in operation.
A lot of exposure to the Synergy has taken place, perhaps before you even heard about it. As you know, the Synergy comes from a "mother" system called the GDS (General Development System).
It is a pretty rare instrument and I've found it to be a very expressive instrument for having only very limited control over the individual tones.
The sounds played here are the ones stored in the internal memory (preset 20).
The Synergy has 32 digital oscillators that are allocated to notes as they are played; voices which use more oscillators per note have less polyphony. Each oscillator can play a sine or a triangle wave. The Synergy is primarily known as an additive synthesizer, but you can also do FM on it (although to avoid ticking off Yamaha, Digital Keyboards didn't make a big deal about that feature at the time.) It seems underpowered compared to later additive synths, such as the brilliant Kurzweil K150, which has a bank of 240 oscillators. Yet, the Synergy often sounds just as impressive, if not more. I think that's primarily for four reasons:
- On the Synergy, you actually specify two complete sets of rates and breakpoints for the envelopes, and the Synergy can smoothly interpolate between the two based on, for instance, velocity information. On something like the K150, the velocity has much more limited control. This is much more complex than a simple crossfade.
- On the K150, each partial can be set to non-harmonic frequencies, but each partial is then locked to that frequency. On the Synergy, each partial can have its own independent frequency envelope.
- The envelopes are quite flexible, with up to 16 stages, for both amplitude and frequency. (The Kawai K5000 had only give 5 stage envelopes.)
- Wendy Carlos went nuts on the Synergy, and spent years refining its voice library. Most of her voices only use two or three oscillators, yet they sound incredible. The fact that she tuned them all by ear - i.e. no FFTs or phase vocoders used! - is remarkable.
For more information look :
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Bell_Labs_Digital_Synthesizer
http://users.ece.gatech.edu/lanterma/synergy/"
