Yamaha FS1r - The pinnacle of FM ?

Shots pulled from this eBay auction. Curse my lack of funds ! Curse my debt !!

The FS1r came out in 1998, at a time when Yamaha were seemingly releasing great products by the minute ! After the CS1x, the RM1x, the SU-10 and SU-700 and countless other devices, the FS1r was a strange one. All the other gear had been geared towards the burdgeoning "dance" market, adding knobs back to digital synths and giving us sound sets with loads of 303/808/909 emulations. However, the FS1r saw Yamaha return to FM synthesis and give it a whole new twist. They added powerful formant shaping features and the result was an insanely powerful FM synth. 8 operators, more waveforms, filters and envelopes than an FM synth had ever seen seemed to indicate that someone at Yamaha had said, "Guys, remember FM ? Well, we never really achieved what was possible. Here's a few quid, go out and come back with the ultimate FM synth". And they did !

Like sampling before it, FM had fallen into the trap of being pigeon holed in terms of the sounds it could produce. You only used FM if you wanted bells, electric pianos, slappy basses or anything that sound like two pieces of steel being hit together. Sure, people like Brian Eno really pushed the technique, as Gabriel had done with sampling, but the bread and butter consumers saw it as a complex form of synthesis and limited their use to the stock sounds which were then heard on every record in the mid to late 80's.

So, when Yamaha decided to give FM one final huzzah, the FS1r was the result. Just a shame that they didn't address the programming issue any better. In fact, they made it worse ! At least on a DX keyboard, you had a reasonable panel of buttons to tweak. The FS1r was a 1U rack mount module with a small LCD and 4 knobs ! 15 little buttons could not access the true depths of the engine below either. There were software editors, but not like we see today.

And so it came to pass that, although it was critically acclaimed as a superb instrument, it was just too complex, too user unfriendly and too expensive to compete and it had a very short life. Even the 1500+ presets couldn't save it.

It's really sad too, because this IS a great synth. I managed to find one via my dutch friend, Martijn Buiter, who sampled a lot of the presets for us to create the Hollow Sun FS1r Collection. Even with this bank of great sounds, I still yearn for one of these.

FM has enjoyed a bit of a resurgence via soft synths like FM7 & it's successor FM8, and also in the Alesis Fusion workstation, which has a hugely powerful FM engine, but there is something about the FS1r that makes it that forgotten hero of the FM community. Grab one if you can. I promise you will not be disappointed :o)