Vintage Synth Explorer

Casio • RZ-1

Casio's RZ-1 came out in 1986 and in its time, it was pretty good. It has 12 PCM sampled drum sounds - basic sounds, and nothing to get excited about either. They included 3 toms, kick, snare, rim, open/closed hh, ride, crash, cowbell and clap. They don't sound like real drums, but they do sound electronic and maybe a little different than more common Roland and Linn drum machines. They have been used in lots of Hip Hop and House tracks.

A real special feature (for its time) was on-board sampling designed to let you create up to four of your own percussion sounds. Now, the sampling specs are pretty bad with just a 20kHz sample rate and only 0.2 seconds of sample time per each of the four sample pads (or one 0.8 second sample). Its a very lo-fi sound, which may be a good thing. The only editing you can do with your samples is a simple low-pass tone adjust.

The built-in sequencer is fairly easy to work with. Just create some patterns (up to 100) and chain these patterns into songs (up to 20 songs). There are ten individual outputs and volume sliders for every sound. Well, some sounds have to share outputs and sliders as there are 16 sounds: Rim+Snare, Sample1+Sample2, Sample3+Sample4, Cowbell+Crash, Clap+Ride and Open+Closed HH. Kind of cool and a little different but certainly nothing to fall in love with here. It's been used by Prince Paul, Autechre, Steve Poindexter, DJ Mike Smooth, Raw Dope Posse, Christian Vogel and lots more.

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Densmore

Posted 191 days ago

DBX all so used this on his Losing Control EP in 1994

og acid

Posted 283 days ago

this is the original drum machine used for chicago house and acid house. a must have if you want that sound! goes good with a tr-707 and a tb-303

eon

Posted 297 days ago

Sounds are a bit on the dull side but its very easy to use and can you very quickly get some patterns going. Great for triggering other devices,,, ideal learning tool

matthew

Posted 374 days ago

Great little machine this well actually its huge and ways a ton. the sampler is great for using little snippets of circuit bent devices as drums! and the hi hat is one of the best shame it only does one drum set of sounds but does have velocity but only when using midi to trigger them.

Haroon

Posted 495 days ago

If you want absolute dirt drums this is the guy. It's probably a good idea to sample stuff into say -- an MPC or the likes first with proper decay, since this has no adjustment for that. At 0.2 seconds per pad you don't have a lot to deal with, so I find it helpful to limit myself to a kick and snare at 0.4 seconds per 2 pads instead. Depending on the drums you can get a bit creative with it.

It's not an SP, it's not a 950 -- it's 8-bit grunginess. It's unique and it has its place every once in a while. With some EQing you can get it to sound pretty good; even better with some compression. One caveat though: this thing has horrible build quality. Finding an RZ-1 that's not shot isn't so easy in my experience. The two I've owned have both had totally shot tone pots in the back, with absolutely no resistance. Your milage may vary.

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