Yamaha SY22

Name: Yamaha SY22
Brand: Yamaha

A joystick on the front panel told you whose DNA this synth carried.

Overview

The SY22 is Yamaha's vector synthesizer, and the joystick is the tell. According to Sound on Sound (UK, April 1998, p.157), the synth's ancestry was clear from that front-panel control. It's a direct line back to the Sequential Circuits Prophet VS, the machine that invented vector synthesis before Sequential shuttered and its engineering team was picked up by Yamaha. The period account notes the SY22 included PCM source waveforms to cover piano, strings, and brass. It gave up the Prophet VS's ability to build custom waveforms through additive synthesis, which Yamaha evidently judged too marginal to carry forward. The article also observes that by the time the SY22 reached the market, Yamaha had already been without the Sequential design team for almost a year.

The SY22 blends two sound-generation methods rather than picking one. Yamaha's own product literature describes two-axis vector control over up to four voices at once in real time, with the vector recorder letting players blend and detune those voices either manually or automatically. Advanced Waveform Memory and FM waveforms sit side by side in the engine - 374 different sounds in total, from which users build 64 programmable voices. The manual-mode vector recorder captures dynamic level and detune moves as you perform them. So you're recording gestures, not just positions.

Sixty-four factory voices live in ROM alongside the user slots, including a complete drum set. Sixteen internal digital effects round it out: five reverb programs, five delays of varying lengths, and distortion. That's a modest palette by later standards, but it means the SY22 makes a finished sound on its own, without a rack of outboard.

The synth's place in the lineage is documented plainly. The Wavestation's wave-sequencing approach and the SY22's vector blending both descend from the same research, but the SY22 stayed closer to the joystick-and-blend model the VS established.

The SY22 kept working for professionals long after its release. Moby, discussing the track "A Case for Shame," described building the song's foundation from a hybridized drum kit, a digital bell part off the SY22, and an Oberheim pad. The Yamaha sat in a hardware collection that also included a Juno-106, Jupiter-8, and Prophet 08.

On the used market the SY22 has settled into an affordable niche. A classified listing in Sound on Sound (UK, February 1998, p.253) offered a mint SY22 with PSU, manual, and over 150 disks for £225, while a TG33 in the same column went for £150. Third-party support existed too: a 1991 Audio-Collection (April 1991, p.42) patch listing priced a Top 40 bank for the SY22/TG33 at $65, and Mix (1994, p.29) advertised an operations and tweaking handbook plus vector synthesis guide for the machine.