SY35 editor on Mac

I’ve been playing around with electronic music again for the past couple of months, and I’m sure I’ll write more about that in the next few weeks as it’s a lot of fun.

This is a little note, mostly for me incase I forget how to, about how I got my old Yamaha SY35 synth to work with all the modern stuff. For the first time since I bought it in 1996 I’ve been able to dive into the editing of sounds thanks to a visual sysex editor. I mean, I’ve had a look because editing a four voice FM synth in a two line 32 character green LCD is not my idea of fun.

New to me is a whole open source(ish) community of editing software for old music hardware at CTRLR.ORG where I found it… unfortunately, the author has made it a Windows .exe but ok.

So off we go to fire up a VirtualBox

Get a free copy of Windows 10 from Microsoft, note use Custom install to make it work

I run midi through USB into a Novation Zero SLMkii so install Automap too

And run the correct version of the new SY35 editor from CTRLR.ORG …set it up to the correct midi channels… and away we go, live editing of all the parameters (including the hidden ones you can’t get from the LCD editor).