These is a digital replica of the original synthesizer Casio CZ-1 from the 1980s by Arturia. It has a very distinct sound. Some demos are here to show how it sounds like:
The VZ-1 takes a hybrid approach to its sound generation. Where the CZ line used Phase Distortion Synthesis and the Yamaha DX line used Phase Modulation (incorrectly advertised as FM), the VZ-1 uses Phase Distortion for ring modulation and waveform generation but true Frequency Modulation Synthesis to generate harmonics.
Is my VZ-1 broken? Have I discovered an implementation quirk that nobody on the internet has ever complained about? No and no. My VZ-1 is not broken and on closer inspection at least 1 person on the internet is aware of this problem, and they figured it out for me! Digital synthesis expert acreil got roped into a Gearspace thread about the VZ-1 back in 2021. The discussion starts off not being very interesting until acreil shows up, who then repeatedly gets contradicted by someone who loudly says things that are wrong, and then to put that all to rest acreil finds the relevant Casio patent for the VZ series and drops the bomb that the VZ's don't do phase modulation at all. They do wave shaping.
Excuse me what now? Yes, pedantically wave shaping is phase modulation with a carrier frequency of 0Hz, but why would you call that phase modulation?
Disclaimer: I make electronic musical instruments and audio gear, some of which you may have right in front of you right now, and have a strong opinion on the subject based on decades of interacting with engineers, designers, and most importantly of all: end users.
>Casio made such a confusing mess of things with the always-on exciters, the exciter conduits and the wave shapers whose frequencies can be edited in the UI but not in the engine. It is almost a case study in what goes wrong when you lie to the user about what goes on inside the machine. Lying is a harsh word to use but when "disable" does not mean disable then I don't know what else to call that.
Other manufacturers such as Yamaha are guilty of the same kind of interface obfuscation - they have a wonderful engine, but a terrible user interface, and their development teams never get the budget they need to make the user interface problem as viable as it needs to be. You can see this in many of their products - one of the most infamous being the FS1R, which has unaccessible yet amazing features if you can pry under the hood and play with them.
Too often, the UI is bolted on at the end of the project and not considered important - or, indeed, used to cover up failings of the underlying engine architecture. Another fantastic example was the Hartmann Neuron, which was an extraordinarily powerful synthesizer engine with an interface designed by one of the industry's worst violators of user intelligence, simply to 'cover up' how the algorithm worked - because, in the designers words, "musicians don't care how it works, they just want to play". This is why the machines don't sell, people: you insult the user intelligence when you just throw knobs and menus at the problem and call it a day.
And this statement is used throughout the industry to justify half-assed, lame attempts at UI. Most of the synthesizers on the market today have UI's which are very little more than a washing machine interface, applied to sound.
A big part of the problem is that the UI is considered a section of the entire BOM where savings can be made - a cheap LCD interface instead of an OLED, "should suffice, since musicians don't care about how things are generated, they just want to play".
There are companies out there that recognize this issue with the market, such as 1010music and others. However, it is still a major problem - too often, menu diving is considered the "only way" to represent all of the parameters, without doing something truly innovative, such as actually investing in a ground-breaking interface paradigm. And, those that attempt such paradigm leaps, are too often managed into the ground by managers, whose lives as failed rock stars precludes any sensibilities that would allow them to shave margins sufficient to the task of boosting the parts budget.
It is a long-term problem. The VZ1, from 1988, is but one example of many, many products in this market segment with absolutely dreadful user interfaces. The market is ripe for a truly innovative design team to come along and fix it - just as long as they stay away from the mind-melting idiocy of the management class which currently rules the musical instrument industry.
What do you think about Behringer who announced a re/issue of the CZ-1 as a small module. I personally have many of the replicas that Behringer made of old synthesizers and I love them dearly. Finally I can aford the synths of the 70s and 80s that were unreachable for me at that time. Of course a lot of them are monophonic analog machines which have a rich UI with one knob per function, but I also like the digital ones like the Brains or Victor which are much harder to program, but still have a very easy to use UI. Same is true for Korg with their volca line. The Volce FM is just great, even though I have to program the DX7 sound on a PC.
I think Behringer are doing awesome things, its absolutely fun to see them release designs based on barely-available synths and letting the kids get access to it all - and I don't share the ire that most, working in this industry, have for Behringers' pricing pressure, as this industry has long been exploitative when it comes to charging exorbitant prices for exotic hardware.
That said, they're not pushing the UI paradigms forward nearly fast enough for my purposes - which is, actually, a good thing: because it leaves a lot of room for big innovation to come from other exotic manufacturers. I just wish it were happening fast enough, but it seems that the maxim is true: "Musicians don't care about the interface, they just want to make noise .."
> Other manufacturers such as Yamaha are guilty of the same kind of interface obfuscation
Everybody agrees the FS1R is a confusing mess although there too I think it's not just the interface but it goes deeper down to them not knowing enough themselves about what can be done with the capabilities of the engine.
In defense of Yamaha, if you read that retrospective I linked in the post [1], you do see that they spent years whittling down their engine to arrive at the DX7 and I think it shows. They did not spend that kind of effort on the FS1R nor did Casio on the VZ-1.
The reality is the oddities of Yamaha's (& Casio's) way of modeling FM (various pre-set "algorithms" with preset routings of phase modulations) are silly once you have a proper modern interface where you can just draw out whatever "routings" you want.
And chained modulations itself is just a poor unintuitive optimization for just running multiple modulations in parallel additively rather than chaining them in sequence. The Yamaha way of doing this is an optimization for old hardware, and is needlessly confusing.
For MIDI-controlled instruments, you are thankfully not constrained by the original user interface; someone else can make a better one without needing the help or permission of the manufacturer. Yamaha, to their credit, provide comprehensive, detailed information on the MIDI implementations of their products even today, a time where this has become unfashionable.
This is all valid (former FS1R owner here, made nice coin for that on eBay...) but in reality these manufacturers were selling the 95% of users who just wanted "piano" or "violin" sounds and rarely did much more than slightly modifying the presets. And their instrument divisions were often dominated by "traditional" music instrument folk, too.
The other people like you and I who want to sculpt sound, or worked in studios... they figured we could deal with it.
Or hook up our Atari STs and use a more powerful editor etc. Or SoundDiver (RIP) etc.
Most of these instruments were made before the huge waves of "electronic music" popularity from the mid-90s on. What we want from them is quite different from what the majority of traditional musicians wanted. DX Pianos, some strings, some Solid/Lately Bass, and move along.
But isnt this where PureData, Max and Supercollider shine? It is possible to create very exotic interfaces with them and many people use it for that purpose. The user communities of the 3 tools is small but very knowledgable.
Readit News
https://www.arturia.com/products/software-instruments/cz-v/o...
The VZ-1 takes a hybrid approach to its sound generation. Where the CZ line used Phase Distortion Synthesis and the Yamaha DX line used Phase Modulation (incorrectly advertised as FM), the VZ-1 uses Phase Distortion for ring modulation and waveform generation but true Frequency Modulation Synthesis to generate harmonics.
https://www.vintagesynth.com/casio/vz-1
also see the former blogpost of the OP:
Casio is lying to us
Is my VZ-1 broken? Have I discovered an implementation quirk that nobody on the internet has ever complained about? No and no. My VZ-1 is not broken and on closer inspection at least 1 person on the internet is aware of this problem, and they figured it out for me! Digital synthesis expert acreil got roped into a Gearspace thread about the VZ-1 back in 2021. The discussion starts off not being very interesting until acreil shows up, who then repeatedly gets contradicted by someone who loudly says things that are wrong, and then to put that all to rest acreil finds the relevant Casio patent for the VZ series and drops the bomb that the VZ's don't do phase modulation at all. They do wave shaping.
Excuse me what now? Yes, pedantically wave shaping is phase modulation with a carrier frequency of 0Hz, but why would you call that phase modulation?
https://blog.jacobvosmaer.nl/0028-mysterious-vz-1/
>Casio made such a confusing mess of things with the always-on exciters, the exciter conduits and the wave shapers whose frequencies can be edited in the UI but not in the engine. It is almost a case study in what goes wrong when you lie to the user about what goes on inside the machine. Lying is a harsh word to use but when "disable" does not mean disable then I don't know what else to call that.
Other manufacturers such as Yamaha are guilty of the same kind of interface obfuscation - they have a wonderful engine, but a terrible user interface, and their development teams never get the budget they need to make the user interface problem as viable as it needs to be. You can see this in many of their products - one of the most infamous being the FS1R, which has unaccessible yet amazing features if you can pry under the hood and play with them.
Too often, the UI is bolted on at the end of the project and not considered important - or, indeed, used to cover up failings of the underlying engine architecture. Another fantastic example was the Hartmann Neuron, which was an extraordinarily powerful synthesizer engine with an interface designed by one of the industry's worst violators of user intelligence, simply to 'cover up' how the algorithm worked - because, in the designers words, "musicians don't care how it works, they just want to play". This is why the machines don't sell, people: you insult the user intelligence when you just throw knobs and menus at the problem and call it a day.
And this statement is used throughout the industry to justify half-assed, lame attempts at UI. Most of the synthesizers on the market today have UI's which are very little more than a washing machine interface, applied to sound.
A big part of the problem is that the UI is considered a section of the entire BOM where savings can be made - a cheap LCD interface instead of an OLED, "should suffice, since musicians don't care about how things are generated, they just want to play".
There are companies out there that recognize this issue with the market, such as 1010music and others. However, it is still a major problem - too often, menu diving is considered the "only way" to represent all of the parameters, without doing something truly innovative, such as actually investing in a ground-breaking interface paradigm. And, those that attempt such paradigm leaps, are too often managed into the ground by managers, whose lives as failed rock stars precludes any sensibilities that would allow them to shave margins sufficient to the task of boosting the parts budget.
It is a long-term problem. The VZ1, from 1988, is but one example of many, many products in this market segment with absolutely dreadful user interfaces. The market is ripe for a truly innovative design team to come along and fix it - just as long as they stay away from the mind-melting idiocy of the management class which currently rules the musical instrument industry.
That said, they're not pushing the UI paradigms forward nearly fast enough for my purposes - which is, actually, a good thing: because it leaves a lot of room for big innovation to come from other exotic manufacturers. I just wish it were happening fast enough, but it seems that the maxim is true: "Musicians don't care about the interface, they just want to make noise .."
Everybody agrees the FS1R is a confusing mess although there too I think it's not just the interface but it goes deeper down to them not knowing enough themselves about what can be done with the capabilities of the engine.
In defense of Yamaha, if you read that retrospective I linked in the post [1], you do see that they spent years whittling down their engine to arrive at the DX7 and I think it shows. They did not spend that kind of effort on the FS1R nor did Casio on the VZ-1.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150912075333/http://usa.yamaha...
And chained modulations itself is just a poor unintuitive optimization for just running multiple modulations in parallel additively rather than chaining them in sequence. The Yamaha way of doing this is an optimization for old hardware, and is needlessly confusing.
I had fun writing this: https://github.com/rdaum/sidebands_vst but haven't had a time to go back and finish it (or rewrite in Rust)
The other people like you and I who want to sculpt sound, or worked in studios... they figured we could deal with it.
Or hook up our Atari STs and use a more powerful editor etc. Or SoundDiver (RIP) etc.
Most of these instruments were made before the huge waves of "electronic music" popularity from the mid-90s on. What we want from them is quite different from what the majority of traditional musicians wanted. DX Pianos, some strings, some Solid/Lately Bass, and move along.