The only reason I know that these things exist is due to the World Cup that was held in South Africa in 2010 I think it was. The people in the stadium would constantly make noise with these things throughout the matches. Could you imagine the headache that would give you if you were in that stadium with them??
I object - the entire CZ line served as a solid alternative to Yamaha’s line of DX phase modulation synthesizers, with a much easier programming principle and a way warmer, almost analog-like sound. Even the old VL-Tone was a fantastic little gadget, solely for the quirky sounds of its percussive patterns. I own a Casio VZ and this is the most impressively sounding digital synth I’ve ever worked with. A pain to program though, but so are old Yamahas.
What really sounds awful are the chiptune sounds in the context of modern compositions - there was an abundance of those in mid-to-late 2000s as dance punk was a thing. The first album by Crystal Castles is the only example I can think of where the sounds of an old Nintendo console fit well in the context of a digital punk-like record with punchy drums and rough shutter or pitch shifting effects. Lowpass-filtered square waves are mostly adequate, but the squealing sawtooths are unbearable and are never mixed properly. Commodore’s SID chip can do crazy shit, like that pulsewidth-modulated riff in Zombie Nation’s “Kernkraft 400”, but it seems like the brain of a bedroom producer who’s shoving chiptune sounds into his tracks is limited to only utilize plain waveforms within an upward arpeggio. Brostep artists and degenerates from Dogs On Acid made sure that all people with sense of taste in electronic music would despise chiptune even as a sole genre.
