DEXED – Free DX7 Emulation and Librarian

I am not in the slightest bit ashamed to admit that I love the Yamaha DX7 (and it’s various DX relatives). I actually adore the synonymous electric piano patch, along with those emphatic basses and all the other things it could do. I no longer own my DX27, but miss it terribly. But I made up for it by buying Propellerheads PX7 Rack Extension which not only replicates its hardware forebear, but also happily reads original DX patches, which means that if you do a quick search online, you will soon be in the possession of a synth with over 200,000 patches, which goes a long way to alleviating the fact that FM synthesis is not that easy to program.

Anyway, today I discovered DEXED. It’s a freeware DX7 emulation VST plugin that doubles up as a patch librarian for the original DX7 synth too!

It’s still in development, but the version you can download now is mightily impressive, as the video demo below shows.

DEXED also came top of Bedroom Producers Blog top freeware VST synth plug ins this year 🙂

Surprisingly, this synth has grown out of an Android project and uses Android code. I say ‘surprisingly’ as Android is notoriously poor when it comes to music production apps, due to the poor handling of audio and high latency within the OS, unlike Apple’s Core Audio within iOS that sees the App Store positively bulging with studio quality synths, FX and sequencers.

Go on, give it a go. There are plenty of sounds included via the CARTRIDGE button on the GUI.