You can’t morph between these as you would on a wavetable synth instead you choose two (on the original, you couldn’t combine 6, 7 or 8 with one another, these were ‘illegal’ combinations), whereupon each will be played alternately, with a resulting drop in pitch of one octave where appropriate. The eight images under the representation of the LCD depict the waveforms available, starting with a sawtooth on the left and ending with a resonant/sync-y something-or-other on the right.
Virtual cz dowload full#
There’s no room to explain PD synthesis in full here, but a brief recap should explain the Virtual CZ GUI. Casio sold them by the truckload and, even today, the CZs have their aficionados, so it’s surprising that there has been no serious attempt to recreate them as a soft synth. Inevitably, their Phase Distortion synthesis (PD) was compared with Yamaha’s Frequency Modulation (FM), but the underlying mathematics of the two systems was rather different, and the Casios had an idiosyncratic character that lay somewhere between Yamaha’s DX-series and the DCO-based analogue synths of the era, making them perfect for musicians who were moving away from the expensive polysynths of previous years and experimenting with lower-cost instruments and new musical forms. With the exception of the analogue choruses on later models, they were wholly digital instruments with almost incomprehensible sound generators and equally impenetrable control surfaces, but they were cheap, and that counted for a lot. Despite enormous popularity in the 1980s, Casio’s CZ range has never been made into a soft synth, until now.įew now remember that Casio’s CZ-series keyboards were some of the most popular synths of the 1980s.