Help:Creating Articles

Creating articles on this wiki, as well as editing any pages requires one to have an approved account once registered. If you need help with this, simply get in touch with hikari_no_yume on the DTM Central discord.

Once you have been approved, you can create and edit pages as needed.

This page will be expanded on in due time to add more topics or sub-pages as needed.

This wiki's scope

We're trying to make a dedicated place that contains valuable information about mid-late 80s to early 00s devices, and sometimes beyond as well if applicable. The devices in question are almost always MIDI Romplers ("ROM" Samplers, basically), where they use built-in waveform data and combine it, with volume, pitch and filtering, to create new sounds. Some of these units have been very popular in contemporary media, such as films, video games and more. Some of these devices would get cut down releases in small form factors aimed for music creation/listening at home via MIDI (Roland's Sound Canvas series, Yamaha's MU series etc), where a handful of musicians were able to keep using and create amazing compositions. There is a niche but vibrant community of people still doing as such.

What's outside this wiki's scope? Well, one clear example would be old analogue synthesisers - we also love Moogs and Prophets and Oberheims, but they're far outside the scope of this wiki. New analogue synthesisers would also fall outside of our coverage for similar reasons. Virtual analogue synths may sometimes fall within our niche enough to be documented, but this might be extremely rare save for the MT-32 and its variants. Although we do focus on digital synths, we don't focus on all of them. The Yamaha DX7, although notable, would probably fall outside our scope - not because it uses FM, but because it lacks any multi-timbrality, and it's made in an era where it was competing with monotimbral analogue synths. Modern digital synths also fall outside of our focus, unless it's a reissue of a synthesiser that falls within our focus (such as some of the Roland Cloud VSTs).

A good rule of thumb is to seek a rackmount version of it, and if it exists, it may be fine for the wiki, but if it doesn't then it's definitely worth raising eyebrows. If you're not sure, feel free to ask in our community discord!

Should I create this page?

• If you can provide substantial information about the synthesiser, standard etc in question that the page is about, go ahead. Otherwise, hold your fire and get some more information first (from reviews, interviews, manuals etc), and/or ask around if there's multiple models that may have different behaviour. Someone's always willing to help if able! ^_^
• Avoid creating pages for red links (missing pages) just for the sake of it as well, for the same reasons as above. There's nothing worse than seeing that there's an article for something obscure, only for it to barely have any information at all.

If the device in question is outside the scope of this wiki, then also avoid creating a page for it.

Redirects

• Redirects can be done for different spellings - JV1080 should just redirect to Roland JV-1080, for example. In rare events where the same model is shared between two different synthesisers, a disambiguation page is preferred, similar to Wikipedia.
• If the synthesiser in question is different enough where you can pinpoint a notable difference, then it should get its own article instead. If the only difference is one is a keyboard, one is a rack-mount module without keyboard-related functions then they can belong on the same pages provided the differences are detailed.

• Examples of differences where they are notable enough to warrant different articles: Synthesiser X and Y - X has 512 patches, a black front interface, while Y has 1024 patches, a white front interface.
• Examples of differences where they aren't notable enough for different articles, but are notable enough for different sections within the same article: Synthesiser V has a keyboard, Synthesiser VR is rack-mounted - the patches, effects and capabilities are largely the same, save for a missing sequencer, keyboard and pedal inputs.

If you have an example where you're not sure about, please ask first! Worst case if nobody is around, create a new page for it anyway, and should we decide it's better fit merged with another page then we will action that ourselves, but we'd prefer if you ask first!

Photos

If you would like to take a photo of a missing synthesiser, then that's great! Thank you!

I would love if you could make sure of the following when taking photos:

• Lightning - consistent lightning (preferably taken in the daylight) where there's no obvious shadows being cast down from a light source.
• Zoom - Taking a picture from further away and utilising the zoom function of your camera will lead to more natural looking pictures, but the quality might be degraded. The minimum I ask for is that you can clearly make the text out on the synthesiser in question, unless it's a keyboard.
• Turn on your equipment - it's much more useful to see what it should look like when on.
• Keyboards - As long as the frame of the keyboard can fit in a neat square, that's fine.
• Reflections - Try and keep reflections low if possible. This can be of objects in the background, light streaks or anything like such. I would indicate the use of a polarising filter lens in particularly bad examples.

Keep in mind that photos will need to be uploaded by someone approved if you're not approved to upload yourself. You will need to also specify the rights to the photo, currently we support either CC-BY-SA 4.0, CC-BY 4.0 and CC0 (Public domain) for own works.

Infoboxes

• See Template:Infobox_module.
• Units should be in the metric format. Dimensions should be in mm (millimetres), weights should be in kg (kilograms), etc.
• Photos in the article need to be uploaded by an approved upload user first. This is done so to avoid the wiki being flooded by improperly optimised images (our space is not plentiful) that may have copyright issues.

Content policy

• Generally speaking, we ask that you do your own research and cite your sources (this can be manuals, reviews, articles etc). Any pictures should be either original pictures (i.e. pictures you hold the rights to and/or have taken yourself) or available in a permissive licensing format like CC-BY.
• The use of LLMs and AI is heavily frowned upon and may be removed without notice. If you do decide to use these tools to write your article, you must double-check the information and correlate it to sources as per above.
• Original research (writing based on your own findings from using a synth or module) is welcomed and encouraged - as long as you note as such, and is especially appreciated if multiple users can confirm your findings.
• This wiki operates similarly to other wikis, its contents are freely available under CC-BY-SA. This means that anything you contribute will be also licenced as such, and if you do use material from this wiki you are obligated to share your material under the same or compatible licence. For more information, please refer to this: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Discussion pages

If there is some information that you're not sure about, feel free to ask about it in a discussion page. You can also ask about it on the Discord server should you prefer this.