'The Cheesey Casio Sound'

[Mati]

Over the past months I have grown to love the cheesey casio sound, if in the right hands it can sound beautiful with some delay and reverb.
Believe it or not, I'm thinking of buying one.
Do you have any experience with Casios (especially like the CZs) that you would like to share.


Also, how could I get sounds like 'brass III' on some of my current synths?

Cheers!

[otto]

I think CZ synths are in a class of their own outside of preset casio cheese. They are very capable and a great deal.

I read somewhere that an 80s preset casio was used a lot on the first Ladytron album, for what its worth.

[polardark]

A lot of the Casio home keyboards are pretty interesting. Some of them have a purely analogue drum section. On some of them like the Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard each of the 4 voices have a separate analogue VCA for envelopes and tremolo whilst keeping the waveforms digital.

The more "pro" CZ, VZ, HZ and FZ series are in a league of their own compared to the older home keyboards from the eighties but they still have a lot of character.

In my personal opinion, the death of "fun" Casio home keyboards came with the preset sampling SA series. They have some pretty cool lofi sounds in them and in many cases the rhythm section with looped percussive waveforms is cheesy enough to die for but it's hard to find a use for them, musically.

[k5k]

I have a CZ5000 and manged to get the cliche casiotone style cheese sounds out of it pretty easily. great patch memory too!
I still wanna smash every single casiotone I ever see though...

[tom Cadillac]

The casios that I love for there 'cheese' factor (though I think this is rather insulting) are the 405 (large keyboard version of mt65), the 1000p (which has a lot of programability) and the CT6000, which has a nice keyboard action with touch response, which alters the balance between two sounds and even a primative afertouch to increase the volume on some sounds. These are all analogue and excellent. The small keyboard casiotones, such as the mt65 are more common, but a pain because of the midget keys. The CZ1, FZ1 etc are later and totally different. I have an FZ1, which is a sampler with nice keyboard and interesting synth capabilities. This will only make cheese if you programme it to do so! Enjoy!