Good evening everyone,

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This group has helped me before, so I always keep it in mind when trouble strikes my venerable Yamaha DX7II-FD with Grey Matter E! board update. I’ve been on a strange journey with that instrument of late, and I thought it worth sharing in case others can benefit from what I’ve learned.

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I won’t bore you with a lot of unnecessarily details. I’ll say only that I’ve been working to get all my DX data dumped to my computer as SysEx files because I positively dread the day the floppy on the DX finally fails. I’ve also been recording all my SE! songs (the E! sequencer application) into Cubase, so I have the MIDI to work with as needed without relying on the DX.

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The keyboard worked great in heavy use for weeks. Then a few days ago it started ignoring any SysEx dump I sent it. It would still play any MIDI data sent to it by Cubase, and it would still transmit its own internal data for SysEx dumps just fine. I could even keep sending banks of patches to Native Instrument’s FM-8 application without any problems. But the DX itself just didn’t respond at all to any SysEx data. ?It didn’t even give me any of the usual error messages about the receive buffer being full. SysEx just stopped working.

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I did a bunch of searching on Google and tried more things that I care to list. But suffice it to say reloading everything via an ERAM file from disk didn’t fix my problem, nor did loading all the banks from the original DX ROM cartridge, nor did re-initializing every patch in every bank, etc. The only thing that worked was pulling the backup battery and letting the instrument go completely blank, and even then I ran into an issue that scared the heck out of me. For anyone facing such a situation, here’s the procedure:

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1. I removed the bottom panel from the unit and pulled the backup battery in the back.
2. I let the unit sit for 15 minutes so that everything would wipe completely.
3. I reinstalled the backup battery and put the unit back together.
4. When I first turned it on, I got an error about how the memory was corrupt, which I was happy to see.
5. I next loaded the contents of an ERAM file from one of my disks.
6. That fixed all the crazy patch names, but I couldn't hear any output either through the back or phones.
7. The solution to that was to select one of the recently loaded performance patches.
8. I hit the off switch, turned it back on, and everything finally worked--including receiving SysEx data!

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I was pretty scared at step (6) that I’d somehow messed up the output section of the circuitry or something, but I think I can guess what happened. When I reloaded the ERAM, I had only selected various patches in single mode. As such, I don’t think the edit buffer for all the performance data had been set properly yet. Once I selected a performance patch, however, the volume came back just as expected both through the headphones and the normal output jacks.

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So there you have it. I’ve read so many posts in the last few days about how people buy a used DX and can’t get it to accept SysEx or can’t get any sound and simply assume it’s broken garbage. I’m sharing this recent experience because it demonstrates what a hardy beast the DX truly is. All I had to do was wipe its memory and reload everything. Now it’s working again like a champ, almost 35 years strong!

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John Williston

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Interesting. Never heard of them. But now that I search for them, I’m even more inclined to replace the floppy drive on my Ensoniq EPS-M rack mount sampler. Thanks!

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