18 thoughts on “Casio Teases New Synth, Possibly With Vocoder

  1. I’d love for this to be an actual synth, we’ll see but the AIX sound source is the engine from their CTX series of portable keyboards.

    1. Casio digital pianos with the latest and much upgraded keybed also use AiX, heard they sound pretty good. Really eager to know what Casio come up with here, hopefully a MODX killer.

      1. The Casio Privia digital pianos use AiR, acoustic intelligent resonance, basically the piano sound puts out slightly different timbres at different velocities to simulate an acoustic piano, whereas with most comparable digital pianos, it’s the same piano sample at every velocity, just different volumes.

        AiX = acoustic intelligent xpression, so maybe it will have some kind of velocity/aftertouch type feature, but I wouldn’t count on it.

  2. Vocoders are so cool. My dream vocoder isn’t an all-in-one keyboard with a mic mounted to it, it would be a pedal with a big display, deep editing features (cursor diamond, scroll wheel, etc.). It would have two inputs for mod & carrier, and internal modules for dynamics and EQ on both paths. The number of bands could go from 2 to maybe 60? or more? Would love to see some other neato tricks like band shifting, vocoder-reverb? etc.

    Right now, there are some very good vocoding options on the iPad, and it would be possible to put something pretty freaky together in that platform.

  3. I feel like Casio has potential to do great things. I love my CZ-1. I found their recent ‘pro’ synths (PX-5s, XW-P1, etc.) to have some synth featured bolted onto what was essentially a home keyboard engine with a few good sounding waves mixed in with a lot of thin stuff. Also, their unweighted keybeds feel unsatisfying to play. In this day of cheap memory and decent D/A converters why some manufacturers would hamper their products in what seems to be an unnecessary way puzzles me.

    In any case, I hope this synth is incredible. I’d love to see them go big because I think they can do great things, not just things that are good primarily because they are inexpensive.

  4. A modern rompler with synthesis and vocoder functionality? Depending on how it’s implemented I could get on board with that.

    1. Yeah the va-10 is there first vocoder! Ha 2 bands! When that board gets discovered one day it’ll be a big deal… You can forget getting one for less than $200

  5. Casio has had its swing-and-a-miss instruments, but none of them have been total slouches, even with the FZ-1’s wretched file handling. I’m one of those who put a CZ-101 on top of a stack as an added voice and got a lot of added beef from it. I’d love to see them release a more upscale power synth that competed well with things like Roland’s Jupiter-Xm. We’ll see.

  6. I just wish Casio re-introduced/re-created their 8-stage envelope (from the CZ-101 and ilk) as a Eurorack module. It was brilliant, and AFAIC nothing has ever come close to it before or since except for Encore Electronics’ UEG, which seems to be no longer available in Eurorack (if at all).

    Alternatively, an updated version of the CZ-101 (without a keyboard, with more knobs instead of buttons, an OLED display, maybe a modest effects engine, and an assignable X/Y joystick instead of a solitary pitch wheel) for around U$250 would be an instabuy for myself and many people I know, and in this day and age it would be competitively priced yet offer a realistic profit margin. The humbly-priced Korg NTS-1 already offers a single voice of PD synthesis, so the computing power is all there, only the will and the imagination are missing…

  7. Looks like the associated GearSpace thread has killed any excitement/hope for this. If those screen shot composites say anything, it’s that it’s a toy joke. Sucks

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