ALL HAIL THE BLACK MONOLITH THAT IS THE FZ-1!

You see, these threads all need to start with a photo and a hail

Right, I've had my FZ-1 for just under a week, and have spent many hours learning to work it's less than intuitive UI. (I've got it down now)

So I've produced the following video of my own sounds that i sampled and synthesized from scratch. There's pads galore, very warm analogue timbres, (courtesy of this instruments filter, which has an entirely analogue audio path) drums and percussion, nightmarish textures, and some colder, digital and additive tones.

It's not particularly quick to work with (although i did do all of these sounds within 2 half days) and storing to floppy is slow and it's sheer luck whether you get a working drive or not, but the sound is beautiful. Very phat and warm to icy cold and everything in between.

Anyhow, without further ado here's the video, i used a little delay and reverb here and there.



PS The noise floor isn't great, but i'm pretty sure i wasn't driving the FZ1 loud enough.

Excellent work....especially in just 2 days (I assume you don't require sleep)! I particularly enjoyed the fruity richness around 3.20. Programming through that display must have taken some endurance.

It's all clicky click click ENTER DEFINE VOICE click click click EDIT DCF RATE click LOOP START click.

Thankfully I did manage to get some sleep, also, thankfully the actual sampling is really easy, you get a little level meter and automatic options and everything.

Oh yeah, thanks btw!

Sounds really, good,

Play some House on it!

Nice! Now I'll have to have a play with mine instead of selliing it...hadn't really given him a run as a synth.....

Nice!!

The filter seems to sound a little more Roland S-770 digital (which had a surprisingly good digital filter) than EIII or early Fairlight analog. Thoughts?

Wow, sounds great! Did I hear some RZ-1 hats in there?

Pretty good! Decent filters and the drums sound quite punchy.

omg i forgot i used to own one of these moons ago....

Excellent demo!!!

You did, eagle ears :p

I dunno, does the S770 saturate, or distort and howl like a baby when it's overloaded or the resonance is up too much?

I'd say that scaling wise, and because of the digital control,
It FEELS a little digital, but if you take note of how the filter interacts with the low end, you can hear all this analogue rawness going on.

How intuitive is the sample mapping on this thing? Pretty much every sampler of this vintage I've used makes the process needlessly difficult (dss-1, mirage, prophet 2000).

PI5S EASY.

You define your bank.

You are on AREA 1, you choose a voice number for that area, let's say, KICK.

Then you press the arrow button down, to go to the key range settings.

You play one key, Bam, it sets the original sample key.
You play another, Bam, it sets the high key limit.
The last one sets the low limit.

Done in 3 seconds! Scroll down to set the level or assign outputs or press the right arrow button to go to the next keyboard area.

I'd like to say something infuriating about the FZ actually!

The envelope, filter settings, velocity settings, LFO's, everything, is edited within the VOICE menu. A voice is a single sample, a bank is a range of samples.

Say you have a long swishy pad, made up of 3 samples spread across the keyboard.

YOU HAVE TO GO INTO EACH VOICE AND EDIT IT'S ENVELOPE AND FILTER SETTINGS ONE BY ONE SO THEY ALL MATCH.

As far as I'm aware, there is no copy function. You can copy a voice, but if you try to make a new sample for the copied voice, all the envelope settings will reset.

AFAIK THERE'S NO WAY TO COPY JUST A VOICE'S FILTER/ENV SETTINGS AND APPLY THEM TO A NEW SAMPLE.

It doesn't slow me down that much, but keep a pen and paper handy so you can blitz through your filter/envelope settings after all your samples are in the machine.

Shit I should have never ditched this thing ... But I don't regret throwing a busted one I found off a 10 story building ... 'Twas fun

I'll be throwing some samples in mine for a synth gurning session next week after getting inspired here. Only, mine's a rack, which is more awkward. That means shoulder ache getting stronger for each minute editing...puts you off getting in there.

Might have to devise a sampler rack that is flat and hover above it.

A flat pack rack?

No, maybe get a tiltable rack, so the sampler modules in it point upwards and I can look down on them and edit without shoulder ache. Tricky though, not much room.

Sounds like a grand idea to avoid neck ache.

I mis-read your post just now and thought "WTF is a tit-table
rack?" XD

Very nice! You've made me want one.

It's a good thing I've got nowhere to put any more keyboards...

D.

I want a tit table, too....just not sure what it is. But I want it.

It sounds like that dodgy dungeon equipment they sell to swingers.

This one is like 18KG! I can barely carry it XD

You could grab an FZ10m or FZ20m though

I fancy a VZ10m next.

If you think that's heavy try lifting an Emulator II

Cool as! Hats off to your deft hi-hat skillz at 4:55

Mr Kitaro use that casio

I just wish I didn't pull that stupid facial expression when playing something hard, you know, like guitarists do XD