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Boards of Casio

ambionix.com

135 pointsfidotron47 comments

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

I submit for consideration the Korg M1 "Organ 2"

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

That's a strong contender.

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

For sure. I got a lot of mileage out of my TX81Z back in the day.

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

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

> 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

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.

Yeah when I started out dreaming of machines I had to build my own 303 clone…

He had the option to just build synths that were inspired by the originals, but he copied literally everything, circuits, trade dress, name. Behringer is a parasite company, once you do anything innovative they come and copy it cheaper and people buy it for that single reason.

It’s cool we have cheap synths, when they actually do something original I’m all for it, but trademarking the Oberheim name and mocking journalists is distasteful. I know a lot of small makers and I cannot name a single person respecting Uli.

Roland, Korg & Yamaha had the ball in their court for years. Uli saw an opportunity and took it.

Korg has also been re-releasing old designs, notably the ARP 2600 & Odyssey.

When I built my xoxbox the demand for 303s was insanely high and Roland could have done what behringer did.

I’ve always had to pin this on a cultural blind spot in the Japanese psyche, where it comes to new and novel improving technologies. Having actually understood there was a demand for the 303, Roland then spent 30 years re-implementing it using all manner of digital techniques and improved bells and whistles (and LEDs) while managing to miss the target every single time in capturing what made the 303 unique and special, which was the quirks and response of its transistorised circuitry and brain-damaged sequencer. 40+ years later they still can’t seem to understand which is why it had to finally be re-implemented by all the XoXbox cloners and Uli.

The original 303 & 606 are pretty crappy plastic machines. The 606 didn’t explode in value in the same way.

Ok well I respect him for his no-f*ks-given approach to putting the instruments into the hands of musicians.

Like when Mono/Poly owners were crying that he’d cloned the Mono/Poly and made it cost £400 not £4000 - this should be a cause for buying two more, not a cause for complaining. That synth is absolutely genius and it’s a similarly genius move to pump out countless more of them at a price people can afford, which all the original makers seem unable or unwilling to do. There’s innovation all over Behringer’s synths if you go looking for it, just of a different type to the innovation found in designing the originals.

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..."

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

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.

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.

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/

Oh! No I wasn't, thank you.

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?

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

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

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

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

>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

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.

Quite an apropos username for a post praising BoC :)

CZ sounds is somehow special.

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.

I was obsessed with Boards of Canada as a high school kid. Music Has the Right to Children and Geogaddi are must listens

Why is it so difficult to buy N-octave mini keyboards, for various N>2, with a good built-in set of samples?

Its not? Yamaha Reface.

But they don't have an acoustic piano built in (yes, I know, the CP has an acoustic piano as an easter egg, but that doesn't count).

Playing acoustic piano patches on my reface wasn’t a good experience. Seems all those light actions have hyper sensitive black keys.

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 ..

It's not a ROMpler, but Hydrasynth Explorer.

How many keys do you want?

Something like a Yamaha CK61 would give you pretty light weight and compact 61 note battery powered keyboard with, I think, pretty good samples.

I have the bigger CK88 hammer action version and like it a lot.

For some insane jams on casio romplers check out Dorian Concepts early videos: https://youtu.be/mBZ7pd1f_P0?si=nmso4EK1y3WYgUbt

Bonus: microkorg, https://youtu.be/OdRP3dQ9QOM?si=A9yrI50fLtwvbMTy

I don't know who posted this but I also watched the original video and wished I could access those patches so thank you

For old-school vintage synth patch wizardry with retro videos, Jexus is a favorite: https://youtube.com/@jexus?si=PkJuiLJaUpj3yjZl

I was hoping this was a play on Boards of Canada and I was not disappointed.

I was just listening this week after not having listened in some time, as it's the 30th anniversary of Hi Scores.

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.

Was playing it over midi w my Push 2 and it was 6 semitones too high?

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