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Rare Yamaha VP-1 Demos


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https://sonicstate.com/news/2019/10/25/want-to-hear-the-yamaha-vp-1/

 

First time I've ever seen a video of one of these rare beasts, with sounds.

 

Related to the VL-1, it focused more on percussive sounds.

Eugenio Upright, 60th Anniversary P-Bass, USA Geddy Lee J-Bass, Yamaha BBP35, D'angelico SS Bari, EXL1,

Select Strat, 70th Anniversary Esquire, LP 57, Eastman T486, T64, Ibanez PM2, Hammond XK4, Moog Voyager

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That's pretty interesting. Sorry for the derail but seeing the video made me immediately think of a Technics (Panasonic) "physical modeling" synth called the WSA-1. I was hired by them to do some factory sounds & demos on it. The WSA-1 had the same configuration of three wheels and an x-y "ball" controller as the Yam. Actually, it had two balls (don't go there!): one was spring loaded and returned to center, the other stayed where you put it. Did they copy Yamaha? As I remember, you could assign the x/y axes of each ball to many parameters which made this synth very expressive. The WSA1's sound production used a "driver" and "resonator" paradigm however the "drivers" were sampled waveforms so they saved mightily on DSP, which allowed the synth to have 64-note polyphony.

 

The WSA1 disappeared pretty quickly. I remember a Technics manager telling me at the time that it was how many Japanese companies operated: if they didn't see good sales numbers quickly, SOP was to cut their losses and pull the plug. I wonder if that's what happened with this Yamaha?

 

WSA1.jpg

 

 

 

 

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The VP-1 is near the top of my "Impossible Dreams" list. I would really love to put my hands on one.

I have a small collection of the few demos ever made for it, and I listen to them for pure fun from time to time. I love these sounds.

 

Of all the instruments that I was forced to sell a few years ago, the VL1m is the one I miss the most. An unique, expressive instrument. The model algorithms were more accurate on certain instruments than on others, but the overall sound quality was superb.

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I personally thought the demoed sounds were some of the best I've heard on any machine.

 

It's quite interesting how the aftertouch was used to implement pitch bend, as I find aftertouch more ergonomic than short-throw wheels.

 

According to the video, one of these sold on eBay recently for $17K.

Eugenio Upright, 60th Anniversary P-Bass, USA Geddy Lee J-Bass, Yamaha BBP35, D'angelico SS Bari, EXL1,

Select Strat, 70th Anniversary Esquire, LP 57, Eastman T486, T64, Ibanez PM2, Hammond XK4, Moog Voyager

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The VP1 is quite a strange beast. What it did, it did extremely well and it sounded incredible and unique once you learned how to use all the controllers to interact with the sounds.

 

But that is also what made it probably the most 'niche' synth ever made. If you didn't put the time into learning how to play it, and it's timbral and behaviorial space didn't hit your hot spots, it would come across as a big 'meh.'

 

The 'failure' of the VP1, if you want to use that term, was that there was so few people who understood & needed what it did and could afford it. The rarity adds to it's legend. There's no exact known number produced & sold, it's been said up to 20 were made. There is at least 3 surviving 'in the wild' - one privately owned here in LA; the one in the video at Innovation Road in Japan; and another apparently recently tracked one down by Yamaha Germany for their version of the SynthSpace room.

 

The WSA-1 is a total apples and oranges comparison. It's been a long time, and Reezekeys may remember a lot more, IIRC it was samples processed by waveguide 'resonators' but the implementation of the resonators were very basic and were essentially just fancy waveshapers -- basic modeling a few types of resonator bodies and allowing for some general timbral motion but no real tweaking of the physics. Thus they didn't effect anything about the behaviors of the sound, which is what VL and VP were all about. A reasonable sounding ROMpler with a twist, but a K2000 could do similar things within VAST.

 

Manny

People assume timbre is a strict progression of input to harmonics, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timbrally-wimbrally... stuff

 

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I defer to the Doctor in his assessment of the WSA-1's shortcomings. Although I'm somewhat versed in audio and computers, I know next to nothing about the synthesis techniques that we're talking about in this thread. The WSA was a very interesting animal, and as I remember it sold for around $3K, much less than the VP1. A few googles and I landed on this Wikipedia article which seems a good intro. What got me to comment here in the first place was watching the video of the VP-1 and noticing the similar controller arrangement.

 

The main shortcoming of the WSA-1, imo, is that the audio quality just wasn't that good. I suspect its sample rate was lower than the typical 44.1K minimum needed for reproducing the full frequency range. It lacked punch and sparkle. The "punch" part may have been due to it's "resonator" processing which as I read seems to work by applying delay to the samples and might smear the attack somewhat. Mind you these are subjective ramblings from the cobwebs of my mind. Ironically, one sound I thought the WSA did well was the acoustic piano! The "modeling" parameters it offered could be modulated by velocity and made for fairly realistic timbral evolution of the piano samples without velocity switching. At that time (1995) sampled EPs and acoustic pianos built into keyboards were not the greatest. I remember being very excited to install the "Session" expansion card into my Roland XP50, with it's two layers of samples!

 

I wait for the day someone discovers a VP-1 at an estate sale or flea market somewhere... let's all keep our eyes out!

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VAST doesn't dp actual waveshaping like a long resonator, except it has been designed to be able to mould into a lot of sound components, of which some sound that way.

 

Anyway I was, and in retrospect still am quite a fan of Yamaha's (Dave Smith's ?) physical modeling synths, because they're adding that expressiveness and break through the monotony of those ever the same samples that bore very quickly, and this percussion sound synth gives me that same good feeling in the above demo, where it would have been nice to hear some sounds outside of the obligate demonstrator genre!

 

TV.

 

 

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VAST doesn't dp actual waveshaping like a long resonator, except it has been designed to be able to mould into a lot of sound components, of which some sound that way.

 

Anyway I was, and in retrospect still am quite a fan of Yamaha's (Dave Smith's ?) physical modeling synths, because they're adding that expressiveness and break through the monotony of those ever the same samples that bore very quickly, and this percussion sound synth gives me that same good feeling in the above demo, where it would have been nice to hear some sounds outside of the obligate demonstrator genre!

 

TV.

 

 

Exactly ! Though the specific methods are different one can recreate the WSA-1 type of timbral shaping and control in VAST.

 

BTW - The "Smith" in question re: Yamaha's physical modeling is Julius O. Smith at CCRMA, not Dave Smith of Sequential

 

Manny

People assume timbre is a strict progression of input to harmonics, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timbrally-wimbrally... stuff

 

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In the time these "new synthesis wave" machines came out, I had years of experience making the tradeoff if I would spend my disposable income towards a SY-99 and some potent sampling options or have a life.

 

Years before, when I would use a "S.A.S." technology Roland Piano, a DW8000 and my usually my trusty TX802 or a backline DX-7, as a student, the music related choices were more in the line of getting those quite attractive dark haired girls to join my jam band, which I thought was more interesting than upgrading my synthesizers.

 

T.V.

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  • 4 months later...

So, not sure this is the right place, but it is a continuation of the topic in a way...

 

The last month I've spent considerable time to track down the resources etc. to get Reinhold Heil's VP1 here in Los Angeles back up and fully functional. Completed the requisite battery and floppy drive replacements, and we're currently getting by on the very faded display (replacement _extremely_ tedious if you're familiar with an SY77 or SY99)

 

I've got it almost there -- it's impressive to watch Reinhold play it as he has considerable experience with the instrument. But we're stymied by the inability to get the model editing software functional. Waiting for some vintage serial-> parallel converters to arrive from eBay

 

Wondering if anyone here has any leads or contacts to track down who actually currently owns or has access to a VP1 to aid in this Quixotic quest? We got the Owner's Manual and Performance Guide via Daniel Forro who was a Yamaha Product specialist for Yamaha Europe. Through Facebook I found a gentleman in Japan - Takahashi Yasunari - that had a fully function system including a copy of the Voice Editing Guide for the operation of the editing software, but he's apparently sold it sometime in the last 2-3 years, but he's no longer active on Facebook apparently

 

We've tracked down 4 VP1's -- Reinhold's here in LA, the one at Innovation Road at Yamaha Japan, another at Yamaha Europe (Both with the parallel editing interface) and the fourth with the interface owned by Kurt Ader of KAPro in Germany.

 

My Yamaha contacts are working on it as well, but they don't know of any other VP owners out there. I'm hoping since members here get around someone may know someone who knows someone...

 

Manny

People assume timbre is a strict progression of input to harmonics, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timbrally-wimbrally... stuff

 

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  • 1 month later...

UPDATE - Took longer than expected given the current situation, but a little over a week ago I got the full editing rig (Mac OS9) up and operational with Reinhold's VP1. Was able to do a full Factory Data Restore, and took the opportunity to record all 10 of the original on-board demo songs.

 

If you're interested, you can check out the playlist on YouTube:

 

 

Manny

People assume timbre is a strict progression of input to harmonics, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timbrally-wimbrally... stuff

 

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Eric,

 

The VP1 is quite the quirky animal. It's been very interesting going back in and programming it (it's been like 27 years since I last voiced a proto in Hamamatsu).

 

It never got the 'love' the VL1 and it's offspring did, and after its (extremely) limited release there was minimal to zero further explorations of it's capabilities. I've only been able to verify 3 of whatever # units sold had the interface to allow programming.

 

Dave Polich, who did the US contributions for the final voicing summed it up well in a recent conversaion we had -- when given the unit to do the presets, the engineers said to him "... this is the VP1, we do not know what it can do"

 

I had a chance to look at a lot of the preset data, and from what I see there seems to be a single paradigm for voice design. That wouldn't be unusal given the constraints of getting X number of sounds in a short time frame for the factory presets.

 

Having a chance to dive back in again, I see at least 2 other paradigms for the voice design that are basically unexplored. There's a lot of untapped potential here...

 

The mystery with generalized physical modeling it just what that potential actually sounds like, or in what contexts it would be useful !

 

Manny

People assume timbre is a strict progression of input to harmonics, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timbrally-wimbrally... stuff

 

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