… the CT-S500.
Daniel Fisher and Jacob Dupre both of Sweetwater, jam together for a little more than 15 minutes. They are playing the combination of the two new Casio synths, the CT-S1000V and the CT-S500.
They’re just using the keyboards in regular modes, no vocal synths. ( BTW : Both can play. )
Note the CT-S500 is $380 USD.
Yeah I linked it earlier.
Note that it does not come with the $80 Bluetooth MIDI/Audio adapter while the CT-S1000V does.
A review from Music Radar. They should have had a veteran arranger keyboard user review it, because this reviewer that the usual “I’m too good for that” attitude towards arranger keyboards. I had that attitude myself, before I developed a better understanding of how this type of tool could fit in my toolbox.
Arrangers have been debated and trashed before, so I’m not going to participate in unproductive conversations about them.
We’ll have to wait for someone like Jeremy See to get their hands on this thing. The Yamaha PSR-EW310 seems to be his favorite among arrangers at the moment.
fwiw…
I like the vocal percussion idea!
I was thinking the S1000V seems like a good fit for a lyricist/songwriter who is in a band but is not the lead vocalist, or someone who collaborates with bands/singers as a lyricist/songwriter but doesn’t hit the stage with them, like Bernie Taupin or Peter Sinfield.
but your use case sounds cool too.
it looks pretty cheap. Is this really appealing to you? Sounds like a device you could use for playing some tunes part time at weddings with your weak keyboard skills.
This is better than the other official Casio video, imo
If the CT-S1000V can turn my weak keyboard skills into wedding gigs then it truly is an amazing product.
fwiw, an arranger keyboard made it possible for my aunt to progress from not playing instruments at all to becoming the choir director and keyboard player for her church choir. I don’t know the particulars of this church’s finances, but they didn’t seem to have the resources to hire a choir director trained in both choir direction and church organ at the Vienna Conservatory.
My aunt did get some help from her good friend who was, indeed, a graduate of Vienna Conservatory, but she had to do put in the bulk of the effort herself as far learning and mastering her arranger keyboard and figuring out how to get the choir to sound good.
Haha. Well I can’t say I wasn’t warned but my curiosity got the better of me. The Kraft demo was like they pulled a random guy off the street and had him do a demo. Easily the worst one I’ve watched so far.
Not to derail this thread, but the title caught my eye. My mom is cleaning out her house in preparation for my aunt to move in with her, and she just came across my first piece of music gear from probably around 1986 that was stuffed away in storage for decades.
Unfortunately the CT-450 is not exactly a killer piece of vintage gear, so not worth having her ship it to the other side of the world, but next time I go home to the US, I’m definitely going to bring my SP404 and sample it for the nostalgia value.
Sorry, for the interruption. 
$65 on reverb, though! 
Better grab one now before I make my lofi masterpiece with it and prices go through the roof.
The styling gives me slight SH201 vibes. Casio do make some interesting kit but they always look a bit weird. Love my PX5S though.
Is the Casiotone CT-450 still worth it in 2032? $6500 seems kind of crazy!
at 5:10, Benn shows off the different voice types, including vocoder. Scroll back a bit to learn about the preset phrases.
Absolutely. This may be another TB-303 in the sense that it has uses that Casio probably wasn’t thinking of.
I’m revising my opinion: this synth is absolutely for us, just not marketed directly at us.
It has earned a spot on my long-term to-buy list.
I’m very happy it exists. It’s not quite a Monomachine, but it’s pretty damn weird and cool for a home keyboard.
Oh yeah I listened to the whole video.
Everything demoed had a vocoder quality to my ears. Just my opinion
That may be a key insight. The “animal” voices sounded like animal calls routed through the word-shaping algorithm, and he mentioned at the end that you can upload your own waveform for voices. It could be Style Transfer in a box.
I took at look at the manual:
https://support.casio.com/storage/en/manual/pdf/EN/008/CTS1000V_usersguide_EN.pdf
I’m interested in the sequencer capability since this looks like a great candidate for the open-mic night at my neighborhood coffee shop - it’s light, has built in speakers, has a song mode as well as the auto-accompaniment, etc. If somebody spills coffee/tea on it, I’m out about $400 instead of $10,000 for the Elektronaut-approved Circlon plus fancy-ass drum machine, Waldorf Iridium, etc.
Page EN-158: “The maximum size of a single song recording is approximately 40,000 notes or 999 measures”
Sounds like a proper linear sequencer.
Songs and User Rhythms appear to be moveable back and forth between this and USB drive and the Casio Music Space app.
Which i believe is also referred to with the “create a custom vocalist based on an audio recording” in the spec ( see my first post in this thread ).
I’d agree with GovernorSilver, all the examples heard in the BJ video, had some level of a vocoder quality to them, some obviously with intent, and others considerably less so. This isn’t likely ever going to be “Deep Fake” audio quality vocals, where you read a series of sentences to model your speech with AI. Even those computation intensive methods have difficulty with singing. ( Reference : A radio show broadcast yesterday on BBC World Service. )
But on the other hand the S1000V is capable of a pretty great range of pitched vocalization, with just the turn of a dial. ( Can this be modulated ? Probably. ) Plus you have polyphony with the voice.
I think that avoiding actual language, and using this more for vocal “acrobatics” and effects will make the vocoder sound even less noticeable.
There are certainly some fun oddball features with this synth.
ADDED : Thank you GovernorSilver for the link to the manual.
Same no feels for this new one. Still waiting for the XW successor.
Once activated, whatever option chosen made you sound like a Robocop. Maybe a Roland VT-4 can give this vocoder capable keyboard a run for its money?
