Video
Story
The Casiotone 1000P was the very first programmable casio synthesizer. It is a sine wave synthesizer with a programmable arpeggiator.
(Ten waveforms) x (ten envelopes) x (ten modulations) = 1,000 different sounds, hence the CT1000P — the name makes sense after all. In reality you'd have difficulty picking out any differences between many of them. There are subtle timbre changes from one organ to another, and that does tally with the earlier Casio style where one keyboard contained four or five organ presets each with a little more treble or a little less middle and so on.
The upheavals lie in the modulation section and basic tone generators. The mod is like nothing Casio have done before. For a start there are 5⅓ and 4 foot percussive harmonics adding realism to the bubbly Hammond-ish settings. The usual two or three seconds sustain has been stretched to ten on one option, and an effect dubbed "metallic" has given a lease of life to ring modulator tinged gong, chime and dustbin lid noises.
But for all that, the 1000P is a softer Casio than its predecessors. The oscillators are rounder and more mellow, something you spot at once in the organ and piano tones which are the best they've come up with. Yet it doesn't have the blistering attack the 202 exhibited on its clav and koto.
De rigeur nowadays to have an arpeggio on board, but this one exhibits a twist, as you'd expect. In one form it will happily run up and down a chord, in another it doubles as a strange, semi-intelligent sequencer. Imagine a chord, then decide you want to play its lowest note, highest note, lowest note again, second lowest, third lowest, etc, etc, picking out each one in a specific order.
That's how the Casio works; it can store 127 positions, including rests, but it's up to you to hold down a chord and make sense of it. Once again it's proof of how different thinking and technology — the philosophies allied to calculator and computer manufacturer — can draw out of a machine something that no pure musical instrument designers have ever thought of.
The arpeggiator speed is controlled by a "perpetual" pot. The further clockwise it's turned, the faster the arpeggio runs until it hits a maximum speed then jumps an electronic border to its slowest rate, starting all over again. The pot doubles as a tune control taking the Casio an octave higher or lower than its 442Hz standard, meanwhile the LED display is offering a readout of the frequency.
The final effects are switchable vibrato (slow and not too deep) delayed vibrato that allows a second's grace before introducing modulation, heavy vibrato (they're not kidding — it flips up and down by an octave) and sustain.
Specifications
Type: Synth/ keyboard
Synthesis Type: Analog
Oscillators per Voice: Min - 3, Max - 3
Controllers : 1
Number of different effects: 4
Number of Keys: 61
Can send on - simultaneous MIDI channels
Responds to: velocity
Sounds can be split by: keyboard
Memory Patches: 999
Number of Audio Outs (excluding Phones): 1
Manual
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