> 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.
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...