nolace's Reviews

underrated dirt machine sampler

This is a great sampler and one of the advantages it has over some of the other is the ability to tune your samples. You can sample at 3 different bit rates, where sampling at the highest will leave you will less sample time and sampling at lowest will leave you more. The sequencer is not the best, like a lot of small samplers from this time, but i believe using quantize (which it is pretty capable of) and resampling with extra silence or space at the start of samples will allow you to get that un-quantized feel. Ive heard people say its like the mini sp1200 in sound quality, definitely not in features. But a very unique piece of production gear.

I used it on the main portion of this track, even the filtering sounds throughout. Guitar -> Johnson J-station -> ST-224 or vestax handytrax -> ST-224. Some of the guitars that appear later are overdubs: https://nothingstellar.bandcamp.com/track/scattered-clarity https://nothingstellar.bandcamp.com/track/another-season

Shaped my tones and workflow

This is my only rack sampler and if i had an idea of where to place it in my tiny corner of a studio, i'd still use it. Rack samplers are pretty big... The editing and saving to floppy or zips really had me thinking about how to get the most out with very little. The sound is unmatched, from sampling quality to the sound of the low pass filters, as well as the ability to layer samples!! Your samples will have the highs rolled off, however i think this works well in adding highs post eq. Enough outs to route to effects in an outboard mixer.

Here's a song i did with drums and synth from the s3000xl: https://nothingstellar.bandcamp.com/track/i-still-broke-down And another one, where near the end is a guitar note sampled to the s3000xl and run through a Johnson j-station, giving it a tape echo type sound: https://nothingstellar.bandcamp.com/track/ahead-of-realization

my first sampler

The effects and editing of the effects is much more extensive than a SP404 or 303. However, the effect when applied to the sample bank applies to all samples, as opposed to being able to choose single samples for effects like the 404. You have mute groups on this, clicks can be pretty noticable tho. Sequencer is basically useless and too often produced a "DISK BUSY" type error. There is a vari-speed option which is like playing all sample at a fixed slowed down rate on tape, changing frequency response and all, as well as sample time, and of course pitch and speed. Resampling is your friend here. I always felt like I could give my drums character using this unit with all the effects and eq.

Unique synth, wish Casio still did entry level stuff like this

The tone is pretty soft even with harsh waves. Most of the Casio stuff seems to have sub frequencies filtered off, even if you have the octave set to those low notes. I used to bump up the eq below 100hz to get sub frequencies with this. This synth uses Phase Distortion Synthesis, which people compare to FM synths however it's different enough from a DX7 imo - you can choose different waveforms as opposed to only have sin waves but still have morphing sounds, turning a saw to a sin as a example.The softness lent well to ambient type sounds.