Vintage Synth Explorer

Casio • SK-1

Well, people call it the poor man's sampler. It is the cheapest sampler in the world. Followed by the SK-5, the second cheapest in the world. It's a polyphonic synthesizer (just four voices) with very cheap sounds and it can store one sample in its memory. The sampling is 8-bit PCM, 9.38kHz, giving about 1.4 seconds. It's so gritty... Samples can only be recorded through the awful mini-mic built-in to the upper-right corner or a 3.5mm line-input plug on the backside of the synth. Alas, its memory clears when turned off.

Obviously it's designed as a cheap toy for consumers. This is the sort of sampler-toy you end up belching into with your friends and play burp-songs for a laugh! There are 11 built-in accompaniment-style drum patterns (disco, rock, samba, etc.) which are all embarrassingly fun and totally unusable. The keyboard uses mini plastic keys. It lacks MIDI, lacks effects, edit-ability, memory, and filtering. However there are 13 envelope shapes that can affect your sample or synth sounds somewhat. There is also portamento, vibrato, and chord accompaniment with the chord selector system.

If you gotta make some lo-fi cheese samples then you might want to try the SK-1, after all it is very cheap! Of course, as cheap as they come and with the built-in sampling, the SK-1 is a great candidate for circuit-bending! It is used by Fatboy Slim, Beck, Autechre, Portishead, Bloodhound Gang, Nine Inch Nails, Incubus and Blur.

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korg ds-10 home

Posted 58 days ago

It's a great keyboard but there's one thing that really bugs me about the Casio SK-1: you can't turn off the rhythm when you play chords. I find that really weird.

fergus

Posted 69 days ago

some lady gave me an sk-1 for nothing on the street years ago, and it was the best fun i've ever had! great for circuit bending, great for resampling beats to dirty them up. everyone uses them, sigur ros, autechre, i could go on.

benway

Posted 106 days ago

My demo of Casio sk5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkwOzC rckOI
ENJOY!

Jeff Hinrichs

Posted 234 days ago

I've had 2 of these and loved them. There is also a line in and 1/4" mic in that you can sample from. The other day I was listening to the radio and a familiar tune came up, it was "The Toy Symphony" by Leopold Mozart. That is the sample tune this keyboard has that will play back in farts or belches. I had fun sampling lines from movies on TV and playing them back. The built in piano sound is useful I think for lo-fi stuff.

Jim

Posted 287 days ago

Nobody even remembers the coolest thing about the SK-1. You could create new waveforms by piling harmonics on top of a base waveform. Additive synthesis with no VCO tuning hassles!

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