Mine’s the Yamaha MOXF6. The only thing that’s obvious about this board is how to turn it on. The manuals seem like they were written by people who’ve never actually tried to use the board, and as if that’s not enough, there’s an Owners Manual, a Reference Guide and a Data List, and I swear these were written by people who never talked to each other and probably rarely speak to other humans. I hate these manuals but thanks to Google AI assisted search results I can find what I want but it still takes a lot of effort.
I’ve had this board for 4 or 5 years and it gets pulled out periodically. Every time I play it I find out how much I love the sounds and the absolute plethora of horns, strings, percussion elements and more. Don’t even get me started on the arps. The keybed is pretty nice too. I can’t bring myself to get rid of it.
I’ve got a whole set of Apple Notes that I’ve made over the years for this board, but I’ve never used it to play external gear, and like I said, the manual(s) suck out loud. I just went through an hour figuring out how to set up zones so I could play the onboard voices in a split with my Reface YC, and finally had success with a youtube video.
So many great ideas, amazing build quality, but also in places extremely counter-intuitive, and due to unfortunate design decision to avoid even a simple tiny display it had vast number of usability quirks. Example: A shitton of different modes for some or all interface elements, only indicated by a different color or blinking of a tiny LED somewhere. These guys literally adopted the concept of menu diving for a machine without a display. That in itself is an achievement.
When I didn’t use it for a couple of weeks, I had to start over learning it. I even wrote my own manual, because the original manual was long-winded Denglish and mostly unhelpful for understanding the concepts, or for looking things up quickly.
Currently thinking my brand new Korg Wavestate falls into this category. You can’t edit the effects paramters except with the librarian but the librarian is pretty much unusable on either of my laptops. It sounds great but after a week of struggling I’m thinking it might have to go back. Shame as it sounds very nice.
The manual is OK, but hard to read.
Or maybe it’s me.
Feels like something is really off, somehow.
And the UX seems nice, until you need to menu dive for saving a patch or adding some chorus.
You can always count on Roland to f**k up what would seem at first sight a good UX.
I always get the impression, when looking at a new Roland manual, that they created it by taking one of their other manuals and editing it. When combined with their love of obscure and inconsistent button combos, it can be really frustrating. I have the S-1 and TR-6s and like them both a lot, but I agree on these criticisms!
Pretty much anything made by Roland within the last 30 years or so. The extent of the mismatch between sound quality (outstanding) and UX (awful) and manual (at least partially incomprehensible) is rarely less than 10 out of 10.
An oldie but a goodie, the Yamaha TX802. I LOVED how it sounded, and couldn’t figure out how to patch from scratch if my life depended on it. It basically had a calculator for an interface to control one of the most powerful FM synths ever created.
And no surprise, that it is the Roland, that fulfils all the requirements. :]
It is Roland JD-XA. I love that concept, and I cannot sell it, because of how that third analog filter sounds (and my unit stops working after few minutes so there is also moral issue with selling it - I keep it as a sample fodder so it has more value to me than selling it as a broken unit). So many sliders, so many knobs! But to me, while it looks at first look as a hands on synth, things go south very quickly, when trying to explore more over half of what this synth has to offer.
One thing is screen, which requires a person to memorise quite large menu structure. The counter point for this approach would be what Dave Smith did in his Tempest, where I can navigate thru logically laid out pages to arrive at the menu with few knobs per page and edit deeper settings than panel allows to.
Another thing is lack of encoder (or better: encoders!) to navigate thru things in that large menu structure, instead they went with buttons that require (and I don’t exaggerate here!) hundreds of presses for few adjustments (i.e. selecting waveform). Ideally, there would be few encoders paired with previously mentioned solution for screen.
Most useful setting for effects are also buried in menu.
Did I mentioned terrible manual? :]
Cheers!
P.S. Unpopular opinion here, but OT is second in this contest by my measure. ;] I simply don’t do well with the structure of Elektron manuals. They are far better than what Roland does, but sometimes things aren’t there, where I expect them to be. My ideals are from Clavia - or at least they were, because my gold standard is manual for G2X.
I had 2 and I am saving for a third one. Of course this time it will be a keeper. Love and hate relationship.
