FBM Fury 800

[Tj Shredder]

Not to knock this at all, hey whatever floats your boat! Just curious though, was there anything particularly different or unique about this synth (honest question, as I said I owned one but I was young (and ignorant!) and using it for covers and never really "dug in" much.

It was the cheapest paraphonic synth you could get back then. For me it was possible to play sort of expressive dynamics with slow envelopes on the filter which would retrigger. That way playing staccato it was soft, playing legato it would get louder by opening the filter. This playing technique was different to velocity sensitive full polyphonic synths. It would lead to different music.
All the reviews complained about this, for me it was one way to be different...
The envelopes did give you more than ADSR! (No idea why todays synths still insist on incomplete envelopes)
But nothing else was special. Paraphony existed also before, but never with 8-voices...
Today with MPE and all the other ways to control a synth sound it can’t offer too much, especially that paraphonic technique you could apply to any synth with an environment like Bitwig for example (not trivial though)...
Those recreations are not just nostalgia (of course they are), they also can help to get out of standard (boring) ways of sound design. Back then we had technological limits and developers needed some creativity to overcome those limits...

[Aloysius]

DEMO sounds great in fairness.

[Stokely]

Not to knock this at all, hey whatever floats your boat! Just curious though, was there anything particularly different or unique about this synth (honest question, as I said I owned one but I was young (and ignorant!) and using it for covers and never really "dug in" much.

It was the cheapest paraphonic synth you could get back then. For me it was possible to play sort of expressive dynamics with slow envelopes on the filter which would retrigger. That way playing staccato it was soft, playing legato it would get louder by opening the filter. This playing technique was different to velocity sensitive full polyphonic synths. It would lead to different music.
All the reviews complained about this, for me it was one way to be different...
The envelopes did give you more than ADSR! (No idea why todays synths still insist on incomplete envelopes)
But nothing else was special. Paraphony existed also before, but never with 8-voices...
Today with MPE and all the other ways to control a synth sound it can’t offer too much, especially that paraphonic technique you could apply to any synth with an environment like Bitwig for example (not trivial though)...
Those recreations are not just nostalgia (of course they are), they also can help to get out of standard (boring) ways of sound design. Back then we had technological limits and developers needed some creativity to overcome those limits...

Thanks, great info! As I figured, I was basically just trying to dial up patches for cover tunes (and not even trying to be exact) and so never really dug in or realized it had anything different from any other synth. I mostly just used existing presets probably (it's been a while....) It was definitely inexpensive which is why I was using it (having expended a decade's budget on the JX-10....)

[Tj Shredder]

It was my very first synth, though I did get a DX7 shortly after. Then I sold the Poly-800 to get a CZ-101 which was even more travel friendly but had a velocity sensitive keyboard. It came back later as EX-800... (I also exchanged the DX for a TX-802...) The Fury-800 was the last missing, now I have an emulation for every synth I ever owned. I don’t count the samplers I owned as synths. I doubt there will ever be an emulation for an Akai S-612 or a FZ-1 - But I can build those myself in Max or Bitwig... The Akai could be tricky, I used it for live sound manipulation and made rudimentary granular synthesis with the two sliders for start and end point of the loop while an automated Midi signal would trigger the notes and chords. As the sliders for those parameters where very close together, I could control the position and the size of the grain with one hand easily...
The 1 second sample memory was enough to record one meaningful (or -less) sentence and shred it afterwards...
Veteran talk - sorry...; - )

[wangen]

How do I install the presets in FURY800? The presets provided from the download on the main website are FPX files and it seems FURY800 can only open FBX (banks). How do use the presets in FURY800?

[FrogsInPants]

How do I install the presets in FURY800? The presets provided from the download on the main website are FPX files and it seems FURY800 can only open FBX (banks). How do use the presets in FURY800?

In the menu, "Load Bank" will let you load FXB files, but you should also be able to find "Load Program", which you can use to load individual programs from FXP files.

[Full Bucket]

Correct. And you can load sound and sequencer data (if applicable) individually.

[ramseysounds]

Not come across this until tonight. I have no idea what the original hardware sounds like or don't really care, I just remember seeing them on music shows back in the 80's. On initial tinkering this sounds like a great synth in it's own right. Simple to download, install and up and running in minutes. Re-sizable GUI is a great touch (200%) looks fantastic on my monitors. Kudos to the dev

Gonna have some fun playing around with this.

(Edit - Also the Tricent is taking me back to very early 80's!)