The CZ synths were really underrated, I think because the presets IMHO are a bit rubbish.
I still love them though. Phase distortion can make some really great noises with a bit of coaxing.
I have the bigger CZ-5000 with the built in sequencer I bought used in the 90s and still play. I think it was probably used most famously by Drexciya but the Kevin Saunderson "Reece Bass" sound was everywhere in early jungle.
I like this CZP-1 soft synth. It's pretty nice once you flip the flow from left to right to top to bottom.
Agreed. I was lucky and found both a CZ-1 and a VZ-10m at low cost in the late 90s/early 2000s. I'm happy to see people exploring their synthesis mechanism in a form with a better UI.
I wonder what the modus operandi of preset makers is. Like, the "Boards of Casio" patch data here is amazing, usable, playable. But the official patch banks of many synths, VSTs etc. are quite unusable. Maybe they're aiming to show the breadth of what sounds you can get out of it, rather than provide good defaults?
Yamaha’s piano presets are perfectly fine for the intended use case. Have a jam with it, sit it in the mix, you’ll see .. of course it’s not going to be their concert grand ..
>A Casio CZ-101 can be seen on one picture of their live performance, positioned on the drum stands in front of Michael Sandison. The Casio CZ-101 is visibly linked to other equipment solely through a MIDI cable, indicating its probable role as a MIDI keyboard within this live setup. Strikingly, the synth's audio output remains unutilized during the performance.
Those harmonies and timbres instantly transported me back to 2001, when I had a dev gig with a music software company. Initially, I shared an office with another dev. Months later I was displaced by a new hire; they moved me to a modular Wenger practice room. This enraged me until I realized I now had total control over lighting (brought in a floor lamp) and music-listening without disturbing officemates. I looped In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country, Music Has the Right to Children, and Geogaddi nonstop while implementing crude copy protection for their flagship product.
CZ-101 owner here. After the TB-303, I'm not sure there are many other small form-factor synths that have had such an outside impact on electronic music
From early Chicago House using the "HiString" preset here, and used all OVER loads of electro https://youtu.be/m78Nx3de6wg?si=1Ya5Q3I967xOGUuu
Two Bad Mice "Bomb Scare" with the CZ organ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQVv40_9NSo
then the "Reese Bass" that powered much of jungle and drum and bass after Kevin "Reese" Saunderson, one of the Detroit Pioneers who came up with it for a techno track https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjduK8Ip0Ls&t=55s
I have CZ-101 and CZ-5000, I tried many emulations and wrote some myself but I also read technical manuals and what goes on analog side, after DAC, oh boy. The synth is is digital at the core but the sound is very much shaped by the rest of the synth.
A couple of weeks ago - gosh, over a month actually - I was driving down from Skye late in the evening with $small_son in the car blasting Music Has The Right To Children as we wound our way from Shiel Bridge up to Cluanie, back down to Bunloyne, and then up to the top and back down into Invergarry and past Loch Oich and Loch Lochy, all the way to Spean Bridge as the early evening magic hour sunlight faded to dark.
Then we stopped at the Spar and got pizzas, and a coffee for me and a hot chocolate for him. "Dad, can we listen to something else now, like Rage Against the Machine?"
He's six but he's being raised to appreciate the classics. We bargained and converged on Iron Maiden - Somewhere in Time for the second half.
Yes, we did see the Shiel Bridge goats, but they were back nearer Kintail this time.
I've been building a phase distortion synth that extremely accurately emulates a CZ 101 (the one I own), but also expands on it with a modern PD engine with higher resolution, more oscillators and modulators, etc. It's such a fun synthesis type to play with, more intuitive than FM, computationally cheap to run and needs almost no memory (simple math, no huge samples to store), so you can push a gazillion voices or very complex sounds out of even tiny computers.
I continue to think Casio is leaving money on the table by not releasing a retro CZ synth. The anti-digital synth bias has mostly faded from electronic music in the current generation. Yamaha and Korg and Behringer and Elektron and others have cashed in on FM nostalgia. Only Behringer is operating in the hardware phase distortion space, and their implementation is cheap but worse than a real CZ in some dimensions (more limited polyphony, terrible capacitive keyboard). Korg just boxes up a Raspberry Pi in a sturdy chassis with a decent keybed and some knobs and sells it at a huge markup. No reason Casio couldn't do that, too. I'd love a new CZ synth.
> The anti-digital synth bias has mostly faded from electronic music in the current generation
"yeah you just don't get the warmth and expressiveness from these shitty digital synths that you do with the Juno 106 which has 16 knobs and makes basically four sounds, oh that track, yeah it's all done with Serum..."
Lio | 9 hours ago
I still love them though. Phase distortion can make some really great noises with a bit of coaxing.
I have the bigger CZ-5000 with the built in sequencer I bought used in the 90s and still play. I think it was probably used most famously by Drexciya but the Kevin Saunderson "Reece Bass" sound was everywhere in early jungle.
I like this CZP-1 soft synth. It's pretty nice once you flip the flow from left to right to top to bottom.
rebolek | 8 hours ago
https://www.satoshiandmakoto.com/
Lio | 7 hours ago
blincoln | 6 hours ago
mjaniczek | 55 minutes ago
amelius | 8 hours ago
MomsAVoxell | 8 hours ago
amelius | 6 hours ago
nkingsy | 6 hours ago
MomsAVoxell | 6 hours ago
adw | 4 hours ago
hexagonsun | 8 hours ago
rebolek | 8 hours ago
jjulius | 6 hours ago
https://bocpages.org/wiki/Equipment#CZ-101
shinybrick | 5 hours ago
quickthrowman | 3 hours ago
nickledave | 7 hours ago
samudrijan | 6 hours ago
chaosmachine | 7 hours ago
Disclaimer: I'm an admin there.
squigg | 6 hours ago
kstrauser | 3 hours ago
semi-extrinsic | 3 hours ago
https://youtu.be/Ps2Jc28tQrw?is=tXq9sAaeK_OurFqR
kstrauser | 3 hours ago
squigg | an hour ago
kstrauser | 59 minutes ago
evo_9 | 3 hours ago
patchorang | 2 hours ago
dayvid | 6 hours ago
rebolek | 5 hours ago
I have CZ-101 and CZ-5000, I tried many emulations and wrote some myself but I also read technical manuals and what goes on analog side, after DAC, oh boy. The synth is is digital at the core but the sound is very much shaped by the rest of the synth.
I love that machine.
jcul | an hour ago
I was just listening this week after not having listened in some time, as it's the 30th anniversary of Hi Scores.
ErroneousBosh | an hour ago
Then we stopped at the Spar and got pizzas, and a coffee for me and a hot chocolate for him. "Dad, can we listen to something else now, like Rage Against the Machine?"
He's six but he's being raised to appreciate the classics. We bargained and converged on Iron Maiden - Somewhere in Time for the second half.
Yes, we did see the Shiel Bridge goats, but they were back nearer Kintail this time.
SwellJoe | an hour ago
I continue to think Casio is leaving money on the table by not releasing a retro CZ synth. The anti-digital synth bias has mostly faded from electronic music in the current generation. Yamaha and Korg and Behringer and Elektron and others have cashed in on FM nostalgia. Only Behringer is operating in the hardware phase distortion space, and their implementation is cheap but worse than a real CZ in some dimensions (more limited polyphony, terrible capacitive keyboard). Korg just boxes up a Raspberry Pi in a sturdy chassis with a decent keybed and some knobs and sells it at a huge markup. No reason Casio couldn't do that, too. I'd love a new CZ synth.
ErroneousBosh | an hour ago
"yeah you just don't get the warmth and expressiveness from these shitty digital synths that you do with the Juno 106 which has 16 knobs and makes basically four sounds, oh that track, yeah it's all done with Serum..."
dang | 11 minutes ago