Boards of Casio

135 points•fidotron•6 days ago•47 comments•

47 comments

squigg5 days ago

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

kstrauser5 days ago

I see your "HiString" and raise you a "Lately Bass": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXBssta3eD4

semi-extrinsic5 days ago

I submit for consideration the Korg M1 "Organ 2"

https://youtu.be/Ps2Jc28tQrw?is=tXq9sAaeK_OurFqR

squigg5 days ago

Yes, good point- I also have a TX81Z, which as well as lately does a mean techno string as well!

QuantumNomad_5 days ago

> TB-303

I know Behringer has a bad reputation for a couple of reasons, but I wanted a TB-303 type hardware machine without shelling out the money I don’t have for an original TB-303 and ended up buying the Behringer TD-3-MO second hand for a hundred dollars. I sort of wanted the yellow case version (TD-3-MO-AM; “Amber”) the most, but my country is pretty small so I took the one I could find. In the end the color of the case doesn’t matter that much, and I can always pick up a yellow one later if I come across it second hand and sell the one I bought to someone else, while having time to do what actually matters in the meantime which is to learn how to use this thing and make some music with it :D

gizajob5 days ago

Every genuine fan of synthesizers should be beating a path to Uli Behringer’s door in order to prostrate themselves in admiration. It’s only trainspotters who don’t respect what he’s managed to do.

evo_95 days ago

Teenage Engineerings OP-1 is a newish small form synth, expensive but regularly seems to appear on Craigslist at a reasonable price.

patchorang5 days ago

It’s a popular synth, but I wouldn’t say it had much of an impact of electronic music.

SwellJoe5 days ago

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.

ErroneousBosh5 days ago

> 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..."

dang5 days ago

If you want to post about this project to HN we'd be happy to help it get attention! via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 or similar

chaosmachine5 days ago

The original author of the patches (oliveoil22) is on the KeyOsc forum, if you're interested: https://forum.keyosc.com/topic/2293-casio-cz-101-the-90s-key...

Disclaimer: I'm an admin there.

Lio6 days ago

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.

rebolek6 days ago

I you have CZ-5000 you’re probably aware of Satoshi & Makoto who are making music using only CZ-5000 with its 8-track sequencer.

https://www.satoshiandmakoto.com/

Lio5 days ago

Oh! No I wasn't, thank you.

blincoln5 days ago

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.

mjaniczek5 days ago

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?

invalidator5 days ago

They're meant to show what is possible. The presets on my synth are split evenly between:

- recreation of a classic patch used in a well known song

- showing off some new-for-its-era feature

- Wow, how did they do that? I'm going to reverse engineer this patch and learn some things

enneff4 days ago

These days many synthesiser manufacturers hire sound designers to create presets that sound great and are immediately usable by musicians.

hexagonsun6 days ago

BoC mentioned on the HN frontpage is a nice surprise :)

rebolek6 days ago

BoC AND Casio CZ mentioned both in same article? I’m sold.

jjulius5 days ago

>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.

https://bocpages.org/wiki/Equipment#CZ-101

shinybrick5 days ago

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.

quickthrowman5 days ago

Quite an apropos username for a post praising BoC :)

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