Picked up one of these for £70, it's quite unbelievable that a full size, 61 key, velocity and aftertouch sensitive synth with real analogue filters (albeit digitally controlled ones, but so were all the DCO synths!) is so cheap, but I guess reliability and it's unwieldy size mean they're undervalued. Mine has refurbished drive and LCD light and loads of disks

Anyhow I was looking for some tips on the following:

1. I've never done additive synthesis before, this has 24 sine partials. Any good shapes to draw in? I'd like to get clangy digital madness
2. Has anyone got the DWGS raw waveforms as waves anywhere? I miss my DW8000 and will hopefully be able to recreate those kinda timbres by running it into digital multi effects. I'd like links to other raw waveform sources if anyone knows links.
3. If I take a long sample with various waveforms, then use the FZ's 8 loop points evenly spread out, and get it to skip between the loops, can I get wave sequencing going?

I'm not too bothered about transferring files to PC at the moment, I'll cross that bridge if I decide to get an SD Floppy Emulator, and intend to use it as a creative sampling synth. The factory samples will be nostalgic and fun, but I'm all about the sound design

The problem was that you couldnt save anything on the sampler itself, so you had to save constantly to the disk, lost stuff if you went out of a menu by mistake and so on.
It was some fun, and you can do what you suggest I think (or sort of at least), I just couldnt be bothered myself.
Although now Im looking forward to a special on it
Theres a collection of single cycle waves in the stickys I think.

Oh ok, so it doesn't remember anything if you leave for example, the DCA menu and then go into the DCF menu?

Its been a couple years and I didnt have it for long. I dont think it was every mode, more when you were in voice change mode and went to play without doing something, or went back in the menu to far.

Oh ok

Wow, thanks for reminding me! I have an FZ-1 in the closet waiting for years for me to get back to it! Soon moving to new home, will be setting up studio in a larger room and should have room for FZ-1 in there. Something to look forward to! (hope I saved some SD floppies!)

Thanks again!

It only takes HD floppies (if I remember correctly).

I found some ESQ 1 waveforms online, that'll be fun to run through the FZ

I bought the FZ1 new back in the 80's for £1849
i liked it..was REALLY heavy
i also had the entire Casio sound library on disc later form the owners club...sold it all many years ago though!

£1849 to £70 is quite a price drop XD

Not much demand for a sampler with a total memory of 14 seconds.

They sound good though, and trigger quick.

I didn't realise they had analog filters! Looks like it's in good nick, so handy as a controller if nothing else - nice bit of space to put a module on top. I always quite liked the 80's minimalist vibe the FZ-1 has, it's very black. And minimal. I'm sure Xander is the right man to wring something interesting from it, can't think of a better place for it to end up.

I regret selling mine before I got into it... the backlight was burnt out when I got it.. so I tried to get one from the old backlights.uk website..

dude grabbed my money and took the noon balloon to rangoon... I lost interest and sold it to a friend.

Digital filters on an FZ --- nothing wrong with 'em, just no particular analog flavor. The FZ is a good "what you put in is what comes out" sampler for its age.

Casio FZ-1 | Vintage Synth Explorer

The sampler from that era with a sweet VCF was the Sequential Circuits 2000. Some of the early Korg samplers had an analog filter too, iirc.

They´re analog

[www.buchty.net] Casiorama

I'll try to clear this up the best I can

The VCF and VCA are contained in proprietary CASIO chips. These chips are under digital control, yet the entire audio path through them is analogue. They saturate and distort as analogue components should and even distort pleasingly when over-driven, similar to the MS20 in tonal filter characteristics.

From around the web:

"The FZ-1 (unlike Casio's other professional equipment) had a resonant low-pass filter. This filter was a hybrid design, with the same characteristics as an analogue filter and it was one of the FZ series' best features, allowing for dramatic, creative alteration of sounds, in a way not possible on any Akai (Casio's chief competitor) machine until the S3000. The FZ-1 also had an analog amplifier. The filtering and level control were carried out by four Casio MB87186 chips, each of which contain two filters and digitally controlled amplifiers. Some people assume the filters are purely digital, but this is not the case. Close examination of the schematic shows that the filtering is carried out after the digital to analogue conversion and demultiplexing."

"What we basically see here is indeed an IIR (Infinite Impulse Response) filter, although by the way described it looks like only the control is truly digital while anything else, i.e. summing, multiplication, and also storing the time-discrete signals is performed in the analog domain using ordinary adders, multipliers, and S&H stages."

"Was quite interested in this Casio FZ-1 MB87186 filter a while back, as there were rumors it might be a very early digital filter chip, downloaded the FZ-1 service manual, it calls it a DCF, which it apparently is, as the audio input and output are both analog, while the freq/Q/gain control is done digitally. Perhaps using internal dacs as a variable gain element to tune the filter, rather than OTAs etc. The MB-chip prefix suggests it was custom-made for Casio by Mitsubishi."

"FZ1 sounds are rough, can easily miss in height (with 36kHz sampling rate in most cases is sufficient) and be really brutal, if one uses the filter. About the built-in filters, Casio has been under much speculation. But now probably seems perfectly proved that there are real analog filters that are controlled digitally.

This analog filter, so rough and brutal sounds like a filter from the Korg MS20, is certainly the reason why - the CASIO Sampler today more frequently establish themselves again as a tip in project studios - despite all the disadvantages

A FZ1 sound that was bent with the internal filters, you can hear 1000 meters upwind from each mixture - I promise!"

It was a combination of all these reviews and discussions that made me go for the FZ1. I'm fine with menu diving, I like exploring digital synthesis, I LOVE nasty filters, enjoy hybrid instruments and quality construction and key beds.

I'm going to be using this guy as a very characterful synthesizer Maybe if I get something good out of it the prices will go up XD

Aphex Twin used one on his early stuff. Mike Paradinas too (could have been the same one?).

Back in the very early 90s I was in the market for a sampler, saving my pennies up for one. A second hand FZ1 was about 600-700 quid for years. The advice at the time was "don't get one, because the HD floppies are hard to get hold of and expensive" ! I bet they're a lot easier to find than DD ones now.

Sounds like you've got a good one there Xander, I've seen quite a few for sale with dodgy screens.

My SY77 had a knackered keys, screen and disk drive. It just wasn't fun to work with.

I would have probably bought this even if it hadn't had sampling! I like a quality Keybed and want to mess around with additive stuff

That's very interesting, thanks. So they call it a DCF, but at least part of what's going on under the hood of the filters isn't digital.

Bottom line, if it sounds good to you, it is good. I never had any complaints about the FZ filter.

If someone buys an FZ expecting some kind of amazing Moog/Oberheim/SCI kind of '80s VCF sound, they might not get that, though.

No it won't sound Moogy etc, but it will sound like the MS20 filter, saturating with the DCAs in a pleasing, authentically analogue way, distorting if the signal is too high.

It's gonna be perfect for my stuff, especially as I'm releasing a solo industrial album next year

That's consistent with the term "DCF" since to Casio at least, it means "digitally controlled filter". Digital control doesn't imply anything about the nature of the audio path.

xander, sounds like you've lucked into a good unit - FZ-1s have a rep for having contacts go bad on the keyboards, rendering the very nice feel rather useless.

The last 2 owners have really taken care of it, one fixed the floppy, the other fixed the backlight. I feel a bit guilty that I got it for so cheap but the price is consistent with other FZ1's on ebay.

Very cool, that's a great price. I'm sure the ebay price would be higher if they weren't such big beasts. I'd love to have another FZ-1 if I could rely on it as a master keyboard, but between shipping and the tendency for the keys to fail, it's not worth it to me. I haven't ever seen one come up for sale locally.

That's great news, the floppy drive is a typical failure point on FZs, iirc.

My FZ10M will simply lock up once in a while, which means re-start (and reloading the samples from the disks). Not a big deal if it happens to you, though.

AFTERTHOUGHT: If your FZ1 isn't memory-expanded (14 vs. 29 seconds at highest sample rate), you might keep your eye out for the expansion kit. There were also many many factory sample disks, of all kinds of instruments, which may exist on the net somewhere.

I'm almost wondering if it was a marketing decision, as well. In 1988, "analog" was no big thing, and "digital" probably sounded like the cutting edge of big-time excitement.

It has crap loads of disks with it, however I found the factory disks online, and also instructions on how to build a high speed parallel port cable for easier transfer, dump programs and apparently, Awave can convert files to the format, so I'm gonna convert some Roland S50 disks

I'd love a DSS1 at some point, but this will do for now. I found the 1MB expansion board on eBay for £50 so may grab it at some point, but I'm mainly using this for the odd drum sound and additive exploration, synthesis, and kinda like the idea of limiting myself. I have other samplers for bigger sounds, my fusion has 192MB Ram

Yes, the casio HT range is also entirely analogue and lovely for pads

God I love hybrid stuff! ESQ1 is on my radar I think I'd Rock that board.

If you want to get randomly experimental with the fz, you can also try sampling a few seconds of a song, then use the CUT SAMPLE feature on it, and fool around with the settings.

You can end up with some interesting new raw waveforms from this, since the overtones of a whole band playing (or whatever) will be more complicated than just a typical saw, square, etc..

Long live weird digital/hybrids . . . the last outpost of cheap-but-inspiring keyboards . . .

I love the fact that the UI on these type of synths puts off 90% of people,raving bargains for those who like to dig deep

Congratulations on getting what sounds like a really good one.

The disk drive continues spinning unless you stop it, so you need to remember to do that to extend the life. I can't remember how you do that, and no longer have one to check, but it's simple.

As your display has been replaced you should be fine. If that goes, I believe the power supply burns out after a while.

Re additive synthesis, I only managed to make organ tones, which is what you'd expect to be the first thing to happen. I didn't get chance to dig deeper before it gave up on me. The kind of complex things you've mentioned may be possible, but I'd expect they'd be much easier with an FM synth or whatever. You could spend a long time inputting something you could get in a couple of minutes elsewhere. But if you do get anything interesting, please demo it here.