Vintage Casio Legacy From UVI and Vintage Vault 5
Vintage Vault Gets Updated to v5 Too!
UVI and Casio have officially collaborated on this new library that pays homage to the vintage Casio legacy of the 1980s
UVI have tackled Casio instruments before with their Cameo library, but the Vintage Casio Legacy is an official collaboration with Casio themselves and sees them go into greater depth with this highly regarded brand of 1980s synths.
Casio Synths
Casio have always had a presence in the electronic music market. So many of us had a VL-Tone VL-1 back in the day, obsessed by the combination of a synth and calculator and imitating Trio’s ‘Da Da Da’! But when they took on the big boys with their CZ range, we were all a bit taken aback.
A company that was previously best known for their pocket calculators and digital watches not only decided to dip their toe in the pro synth market, but they did so with their own form of synthesis, Phase Distortion.
And they didn’t stop there. Soon, there were samplers and drum machines with PCM samples and sampling capability. They didn’t mess about, and best of all, their range was affordable and sonically impressive!
During the mid/late 1980s, I played in a pub covers band, and our keyboard player had a JUNO-106, itself a thoroughly impressive and affordable synth, but his main tool was a Casio CZ-5000. In fact, before I joined, they didn’t have a drummer; they had a Casio RZ-1! That’s right, in a strange turn of events, a human being made a drum machine redundant.
Vintage Casio Legacy
Anyhoo… UVI’s Vintage Casio Legacy seeks to provide a comprehensive roundup of all of Casio’s 80s efforts, with six distinct instruments: CZ (Phase Distortion), FZ (Sampling), VZ (Interactive Phase Distortion), HZ (Spectrum Dynamic Synthesis), CTK (Integrated Cross-Sound Architecture) and RZ (Sampling Drum Machine).
That’s quite an impressive set of instruments and sound sources, and UVI have done what they do best with its stuff. They’ve deeply multi-sampled each instrument (that’s correct, no modelled synth architectures here) and put them behind clear, intuitive and visually pleasing user interfaces.
Extras
They than add a wealth of synthesis features and performance tools to allow you to shape the sounds in your own way. Effects, arpeggiators, filters, envelopes, LFO and more give you plenty of scope for sound design, even if it is all based on samples.
Vintage Casio Legacy presents itself within UVI’s Falcon or their free Workstation instrument as seven folders. There’s one for each instrument range, then a seventh called Multis. Mutlis is a very useful blend of presets that, as the name suggests, gives you multis based on combinations of various instruments from the pack.
These are categorised by styles and genres, like Dark Wave of Slow Fi, and within each are, typically, more than 20 combos that deliver instant fun and inspiration by combining, say, a drum machine and bass patch, or some lovely, blended pad sounds, augmented by preset patterns and arps. In fact, it felt like the driver behind this was to create some sort of advanced ‘one-finger-accompaniment’ that you’d find on Casio’s home keyboards.
Is It Any Good?
Long before the likes of Behringer were sneered at for being budget-friendly and therefore not that great, Casio were seen by some as the poor relation of the synth market. However, they soon grew a legion of fans, not just for their price, but for the quality. So much so that many of the instruments sampled here fetch a pretty penny on the used market these days!
So it’s a really cool package to have a ton of these great sounds easily accessible via UVI’s excellent platform. And of course, if you’re using Falcon, which you really ought to be, in my humble opinion, you can dig further into the sounds and tweak them at a very deep level.
Furthermore, UVI have taken the opportunity to launch Vintage Vault 5 which now includes the Vintage Casio Legacy as well as HX-20, HX-Oddy, PX WaveFrame, PX Guitar Syn, Mission 6 and KAWAI Vintage Legacy. It’s a superb collection and will save you a ton of cash over buying each element separately.
More Information
You can also get Vintage Casio Legacy as part of UVI’s excellent SonicPass subscription, which is insane value for money at just $24/24€ per month! Vintage Casio Legacy is out now and can be had for just €199 until April 27th, after which it reverts to its full price. Vintage Vault 5 is on offer at €299 (40% off) until the same date.
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