Post
by felini » Thu May 28, 2009 10:22 pm
I have a 601, all wood and metal, nothing plastic on the 601. It has awesome organ sounds, some cool rythms and useful fingered chord and memory functions for the auto accompaniment. Every sound sounds the same, with different envelopes and slightly different filtering, but yet the same sound (not a bad thing).
It has two orange buttons, one has an image of an explosion, and the other something like an atom. When you press them, you get two sounds: one makes peeow and the other pooew, or something like that. That´s the best feature on the 601.
When you have the rythm on, you have the option to add a fill in. That´s acomplished by touching a rectangular piece of metal on the front of the keyboard. Not a key, or slider or button, just a piece of metal that acts by the simple touch of a finger, or any other part of your body. That´s weird.
It has vibrato (two speeds), sustain (short or long), vibrato delay, volume pedal and sustain pedal inputs, high and low outputs, and headphones out.
It has its own metal stand, with the word CASIO in big letters. That´s cool for stage, if you´re a Casio freak, like some of us.
With a bit of imagination and good will, you can get a good pinkfloydesque sound, or even portisheadish by using disco rythm at low speed, fingered chord auto accompaniment with memory, organ sound, slow vibrato and playing minor chords. Remember: imagination!
Conclussion: it sounds great, it has weird features and it will never break or need a service. Perfect.
The thing I like most about Casio, is that it always holds a surprise for you, even with the smallest keyboard. Example: I bought a Casio SK-1, and I thought: "wow, a Casio with a sampler, that´s awesome", and when I got it, I found that it had additive synthesis functions and envelopes you could assign to any sound. There´s always something else, like the VL-1, that has a calculator.
They keep coming up at ridiculous prices, look a bit phony but otherwise they seem like heavy packages of hot cheese. 
I wonder which model that was..would be fun to get now and mess with. Can't even remember if it had any synthesis at all, probably just PCM samples and rythm box w/ comp. Think it had speakers too.
