Boards of Casio

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'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 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.

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

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?

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.

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