This month's bit of editorial beefing leads on, indirectly, from what was said on this page in E&MM March. Then, some of the magazine's staff had just returned from the Frankfurt Musikmesse (the music industry's biggest trade show), having found little evidence that programming synthesisers was going to be made any easier by the crop of new instruments the year was bound to bring.

Most modern keyboard players are now reconciled to the fact that new machines don't offer the ease of sound-manipulation made possible by the synths of four years ago — with their huge, costly banks of knobs and switches. Many have also reconciled themselves to working with synthesis principles which, though utterly logical in their configuration, simply don't give the immediacy and predictability of result offered by traditional analogue techniques.

Yamaha's FM and Casio's Phase Distortion principles are fine-sounding systems which have given existing synth users a whole new vocabulary of voices, and which have done much to further the cause of sound synthesis as a whole. Yet the fact remains that neither is very easy to get on with when it comes to programming.

No matter what you do with sets of numbers, they'll never be as easy for musicians to understand as an oscillator, running through a filter, running through an amplifier. Which is why so many DX and CZ users leap at the chance of another set of ROM sound cartridges, when they've got a whole machine's worth of programming capability in front of them just waiting (and waiting) to be used. And why of all the technical queries we receive daily, questions regarding DX and CZ programming figure high amongst the most common.

Beginning on page 62 of this issue, you'll find an exclusive, in-depth review of a new synthesiser that threatens to change all this — the Sequential Prophet VS. As many of you will already know, the 'VS' bit stands for Vector Synthesis, a technique whereby four different sound sources can be mixed in any proportion simply by moving a cursor (in the VS' case, a joystick) within a diamond-shaped field which has one sound source at each corner. When you consider that the new Prophet has 128 different software-generated waveforms permanently in memory, you begin to realise that, potentially, it could herald the arrival of another extension to the sonic vocabulary — not a minor annexe of new sounds (which is what too many new synths provide), but a fully-fledged, self-contained library of new material for synth programmers to toy with at their leisure.

'Leisure' is undoubtedly what Sequential's designers want programmers to enjoy as they play with the VS' huge array of possibilities. And pretty leisurely it is, too: tapping in waveform numbers, assigning them to the four corner positions, and playing with the joystick until the thing sounds right. There's plenty of potential, but more than that, it's instantly accessible, which is more than you can say for the DXs and CZs of this world.

Unfortunately, the VS system has a major drawback. For whereas conventional subtractive synthesis has traditionally been based around simple oscillator waveshapes such as square, sawtooth and triangle, Vector Synthesis as implemented on the Prophet introduces over a hundred harmonically-complex waveforms. Look at one in isolation and it's difficult to envisage what sort of sound it's likely to produce; look at four being mixed together with an immediately variable balance of levels, and it's impossible to know what might happen until you actually put them in position and start twiddling.

Sound creation on the VS, then, can be a decidedly hit-and-miss affair, as Sequential themselves readily admit. Their synthesis principle is hugely capable and instantly accessible, but more difficult to predict than any yet devised, FM included.

Having mulled these points over for a while, I began to ask myself why I wanted the VS to succeed so much. Production in California is due to begin as you read this, and when it arrives in Britain, the VS will cost under £2000. That makes it extraordinary value for money by any reckoning and, as Pete Schlesinger says in his review, it deserves to make an impact simply because it offers to open up a new horizon of sound at a time when the craze for sampled, preset and prepackaged sound threatens to close all the others down.

Whether Vector Synthesis will succeed in coaxing a generation of keyboardists into complex programming remains to be seen. Personally, I doubt it. The system in its present incarnation is simply too unwieldy to make much sense to musicians, most of whom simply don't have the time — even if they have the inclination — to sit in front of a control panel, frantically scribbling notes and doing arithmetic, while the rest of the music community is out writing, recording or gigging. Like FM and PD, VS has been tripped up by its own complexity.

But I do believe that a few industrious individuals (and the history of FM has shown that's all it takes) will take the time to get to know the VS, and that their efforts will result in our library of sound being broadened and enriched.

It seems, these days, that sound-creation has to be a long, complex and diligently-followed process, if it's to succeed at all.