nothing quite like it

You could be forgiven for assuming that the Yamaha SY35 sits somewhere between the SY22 and SY77/99 in the 90s Yami range. Nothing could be further from the truth. While the voice architecture is firmly in the SY AWM/FM style, this synth was masterminded by none other than Dave Smith during his time advising Yamaha and Korg when they were the same company. It shres a decent digital fitler with the big boy proto-workstation SYs and ahs their more refined, hifi 16 bit sound, so none of the cool 22 grit from the sampled waveforms. Its multitimbral like the big boys. Butin exchange for the grit you get a prophet VS joystick allowing you to blend timbres in real time, vector style. The 22 does this, but not as well and its not the 22's forte. The 25 really steps up the game. Think wavestation but 50% DX100. There are some excellent youtube vids that fully show off the unique sound of this digital pad monster. Because the 35 is little understood these days it can be had for peanuts on ebay and reverb. Editing via the front panel is a chore, but if you have a windows device there's an excellent graphical midi editor so you can create basic patches to use live. The only drawback to this type of machine is that to thoroughly enjoy the wonders of vector synthesis you need a free hand for the joystick. As a guy who will often be playing multiple keyboards this is a bummer relegating the synth's performance usage to breakdown and fill sections or passages where my bandmates are center stage. That said, in a studio environment I think this synth is one of the finest digital synths of the era... of any era. Its a gamechanger like the DX7, Prophet VS, D5 and wavestation and like all those boards its really a unique piece of kit, dripping in personality and potential. I am, of course, a well known Yamaha fanboy and this is very much a clean Yamaha sound. If that's not for you? Skip the SY35. otherwise? Grab 'em before people realize what a beast this thing is.