#vss-30

Do you ever find yourself faced with a large number of options, only to realize that each and every one of them is absolute garbage and in the end you're totally fucked no matter what? Pretty much sums up my feelings towards political goings on in the UN-United Snakes of A Merry Cow. Oh don't get me wrong, I'm all for whoever (whomever?) is going to rid the universe of the travesty to sentient life that is Conald J Drumpf and his entire crime family and entourage. But it all feels so fucking hopeless. Personally, I registered to vote by absentee ballot considering I live on the other side of the planet, but upon checking the relevant homepage to see where the fucking hell my goddam ballot is this late in the game, I see it was marked "mailed" on September 18th (that's a month and ten goddam days ago, people). In contrast, I have received things I've ordered off eBay and other US-based online shops, and none of those things took more than ten days—the last one took less than a week! Ah, this is how democracy dies. Yeah, a real dumpster buffet indeed. Fucking hell. Enough! On with the normal irregularly scheduled baloney!

It's Yamaha time! I dunno how I got interested in the VSS-30. Saw this one on the auction here, with this in the description, "Used to work, but I tried it recently and it wouldn't turn on." Checked eBay to see if they were still getting stupid money for these (they are). OK, let's bid 100 bucks and see what happens. $75 won it. Came in the original box, but no manual, oh well. Plugged it in to a spare Yamaha adapter I have and it worked no problem. Hmmmm. Maybe the dude was trying to run it on batteries? Opened it up and yikes the (-) spring terminal was corroded something fierce. Popped it out, slapped it in a shot glass filled with vinegar, and half an hour later it was clean. The wire broke off where it was soldered to the terminal while I had it soaking. Soldered it back together and everything is groovy now.

Other Yamaha happenings... I forget if I blabbed about this one but I don't think I did. I sold the TQ-5 I had here recently. Then a week later I saw a B200 for stupid cheap. The seller said the power button died so he wired up a rocker switch and installed that on the side where the output jacks are, and that otherwise, everything was fine. What the hell, why not? It's a lot more fun than the TQ was, but of course I feel that way about any keyboard versions of module synths. I was surprised how goddam LOUD the onboard speakers were too. Specs say 20W per channel and I don't think they're lying. Oof. It was one of the first in the EOS (Entertainment Operating System) line of synths. Evidently Tetsuya Komuro was a huge user/programmer/spokesperson for the EOS synths. I pretty much can't stand anything that fool has had his hands in, so it's virtually shocking that I actually bought this synth. But anyway, it works fine with a CTRLR editor for the TX81Z that you can download for free. You see, with the B200, like the YS200 and TQ5, the things you can actually edit from the front panel are SUPER limited, and I'm not shitting you about this, they've whittled the number of editable parameters down to like twenty or so, and the nomenclature is completely different to boot, so forget about programming patches from scratch with any of the synths in this family (I mean the YS100, YS200, B200 and TQ5, and I think there was another, DS55 or something?). If you have an editor, they will respond to sysex and you can change the algorithms and waveforms and all individual envelope settings and all that. If not, you get five categories of parameters: EG, TONE, LFO, NAME, EFFECT, and that's it. Under EG, you can alter the attack, decay and release of Tone, Volume, or both at the same time, but only by a factor of +/-10. Changes DO have an audible effect so that's nice. It's a bit weird. TONE lets you fool with Brilliance, Wave and Input-4Nos! (this lets you select the waveforms of the four operators but you'll have to hunt high and low before finding out exactly what those waveforms are). Brilliance seems to work like a basic filter or equalizer, with higher settings giving sharper, brighter sounds, and I feel like this is maybe tweaking the level of modulators to carriers? Wave wreaks havoc in a good way, and I'm not really sure what is going on here. Seems like Brilliance on steroids. LFO deals with the LFO. NAME... um, yeah, name. EFFECT lets you select which of the nine effects you want, or none, and just being able to slap a simple hall reverb on a pad sound makes a world of difference. I've sent TX81Z sysex to it and it worked fine. Combed through like 40 something banks I found online. Bought a memory card off eBay, and to my surprise it came loaded with compatible sounds! No idea what the previous owner used the card with but I am not complaining at all. I was gonna go and save the patches from those 40 banks that I thought were interesting, but again, surprise surprise! Most of those sounds were already there. WEIRD!!! Anyway, it's easy to take a preset sound that is somewhat in the neighborhood of a sound you have in mind and then tweak the few parameters that you can from the front panel, and get interesting results doing so. But, even though the CTRLR editor does the job, and you get total programmability, it doesn't make much sense unless you're super familiar with how FM works, and I am far from it, so I dunno how I feel about it altogether. Neat synth in any case. I'd like to get the iPad editor and the TQ5 panel, but my iPad is ancient so unless I'm going to shell out a few hundred bucks for a newer iPad.... well... Hmmmm.

Stolen from the internet, this photo. Heh. Weird synth. Fun anyway.