ZEN-core is Roland’s most recent synthesis recipe. And it is not.
That’s very Zen. We might become enlightened by asking – why is ZEN-core?
(This article has been edited to fix errors).
Go back to 2011. The Jupiter 80 and 50 arrived and began the familiar troubled dance: Roland unveils something new, the audience calls out the ways it differs from their childhood sweetheart. It is not a Jupiter 8, but a lie, a deception, and nothing else will ever be good enough. The machine is dressed up to faintly resemble the memory – exactly what the audience requested. But now it is a grievous insult to the faithful.
In 2014 there was a change of management. Then came rumblings of a new thing – models of the original analogue machines held by Roland in their secret vault. The replicant sound of childhood – and you can have any of the ‘legendary’ machines all at once! You can Plug In and Plug Out! This was AIRA, a special division formed to please the faithful and deliver the goods. The machines are dressed in futuristic glowing colours on black – it doesn’t faintly resemble a thing, it’s a thing!
Let a thousand flowers bloom – there came the System-1, the System-8, drum machines, groove boxes, even a full euro rack set called System-500 that you can’t afford so just look don’t touch thanks. You could get Boutiques in strictly limited editions. Again this is exactly what people demanded… but not that many people to be honest and so the sales figures, well, the figures weren’t enough. Do you remember TORCIDO, BITRAZER, DEMORA and SCOOPER? They’re about the point where the accountants stepped in and said We Are Not Korg – Discontinue with Extreme Prejudice.
Management looked carefully at this bunch of wild flowers and decreed that from now on everything had to become as one. Zen is maintaining the one without wavering.
Be More Like The Fantom, the Buddha might also have said, as over the years the Fantom line had adopted each technology that came along and yet actually sold.
Somewhat Old Somewhat New
ZEN-core is built upon the old Sample and Synthesis machines – the JD800 and XV5080 etc., skipping over the Supernatural machines such as the JD-XA and Integra. It runs on Fantom, on groove boxes, in software, and on new machines since 2020. It’s quite an achievement as a melting pot of all Roland’s hopes and dreams. But it’s also defined by what has been left out of the pot.
Most reviewers skip this history and are therefore critical of the interface for being ‘dated’, but this is a consequence of needing to include so much.
History
My overview of 1990’s Sample and Synthesis can be found here. Each patch has four tones. Each tone is a sample, a filter and amp. Pairs of tones combine in structures, which rearrange these components as well as special boosters and ring modulators that give some limited measure of interaction between tones. There’s also an odd modulation called FXM that no one quite understands. Sample and Synthesis was not a particularly intuitive method but enormously successful.
In Supernatural Synthesis the terminology shifted – each patch combines Supernatural tones on multiple MIDI channels. On the Integra there are 16 tones and JD-XA has three. Each tone has three partials, which are complete sets of oscillator/sample, filter, amp and LFO. The booster and ring mod are gone – partials 1 and 2 in each tone can be directly ring modulated and a ‘wave shape’ setting attempts to provide synch effects by applying the pitch of partial 2 to partial 1 – not quite the real thing.
The first six oscillators are ‘modelled’, which I guess means they are mathematically generated across the keyboard range. Pulse width now works. The supersaw is a PCM signal with seven layers. The rest of the sound sources are familiar PCM samples (including the Jazz Doo)
There are the usual HPF, BPF and LPF – and three other LPF, “suitable for reproducing the classic synthesizer sounds of the past”. This is much simpler than the old S+S, as you just stack up tones with partials like a rack of modules.
But all of that was binned. Supernatural Synth joined the great Roland graveyard in the sky.
In Zen-core Structures are back but the terminology has shifted – in a JP-X patch there are five parts – each part is a tone. Four partials are in each tone now with synch, ring mod, cross mod and fat settings available when nine ‘VA’ (not ‘modelled’) waveforms or a small list of PCM sync waveforms (including Dentist) are used. {Although manual says ‘fat’ boosts the bass, it actually warps the wave form}. Even the mysterious FXM is back! “This is useful for creating dramatic sounds or sound effects”, we are excited to know.
The filters are either the old TVF: the usual set, with additional 2 pole and variable LPFs – neither of which can have resonance. Or newer VCF being JP, MG or P5 emulations. Two LFOs are available per partial. It’s easier than old Sample and Synthesis, and has more settings, but there’s not a clear reason for it all to regress 20 years except perhaps to match the successful XV-5080.
If you have a real XV-5080 you’ll soon find disappointments in the remake. No user samples – at least in the Zenology software and JP-X. No expansion boards. There are now Wave Expansions that are the same SRX voices as were sold last century. They work on most Zenology hardware but not on the MC-707.
The why?
Yes, the Jupiter 80 was ‘the old company’ so no love there, and AIRA was a fancy fishing expedition. But more – checking out Roland’s 2020 Financial Report we are reminded that the whole ‘creator’ area is only 12% of business. Pianos and Accordions is 28%. V-Drums are 23%. Be more Fantom. The sound library on Roland Cloud makes more money than the hardware. Slide 14 sums it up.
ZEN-core is not a new technology in search of new sounds. It is a technology capable of delivering a huge existing library of solutions built up over decades, based on a standard ‘BMC’ chip set applied to every instrument. So the next time somebody asks when Roland will re-issue the childhood sweetheart, you should slap them with your monk staff. Om.