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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 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.
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.
Wenger rooms were the best thing to happen to my productivity in '99. Sound-isolated, no one could see your monitor. Then open-plan came along and they ripped them all out. Boards of Canada through decent headphones in a closet is still my idea of a good dev environment.
For anyone missing the joke: the title riffs on Boards of Canada, and "Turquoise Hexagon Sun" is a track off their first album. That warped, detuned tape sound is why cheap Casio keyboards fit so well. I've had good luck faking it with a slow pitch wobble and some tape saturation.
Was anyone else surprised how much of the early BoC sound came from cheap gear and tape degradation rather than the synths themselves? I always assumed it was all Juno-type stuff. Wonder how much of that warble you could fake today with a plugin versus actually wrecking a cassette.
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.
Same here. Patch dumps like this tend to vanish when someone's old hosting plan lapses, so I'd grab a copy now. We lost a bunch of our own preset files that way once. Even a zip on a drive somewhere beats trusting a blog to stay up.
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.
Anyone here opened up an SK-1? The sampler is tiny, around a second at 8-bit, and that grit is the whole appeal. Sample a drum loop, drop it an octave, and it sounds like a bad tape in the best way. Bending the board is easy too, since the traces are huge.
