Casio RZ-1
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The Casio RZ-1 was a drum machine manufactured and released by Casio in the 1986. It was one of the first drum machines to have an on-board editable sampled drum beat. it had a number of sounds built into its ROM.
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It was the first affordable drum machine that could use sampled sounds. Well, sort of anyway: when you are limited to either four samples of 0.2 seconds each, or one sample of 0.8 seconds, you can forget about sizzling crash cymbals or solid jungle loops. But it is possible to create some short and unusual sounds to spice up your rhythm patterns, such as for instance a finger cymbal, a metal pole sound or four percussive vocal samples.
The sampling frequency is 20 kHz, which results in a bandwidth of around 10 kHz - we don't speak high quality sampling here. To make things worse, the RZ-1 will clip nearly everything. Even your clearest sound sources will sound grungy and industrial once the RZ-1 has done its dirty work. Now, please don't misunderstand me, I really find that coarse and crude sound quite enjoyable - after all, music is supposed to be fun!
The sampled sounds cannot be edited in any way whatsoever. The only parameter for the samples is called "Tone", but this is just a simple lowpass filter. Quite frankly, I haven't the faintest idea why anyone would need it, since the samples sound quite low-res and muffled without filtering. The rest of the drum sounds (twelve PCM samples) are pretty decent and solid even though most of them does not resemble real acoustic drums at all, but are rather artificial sounding. Particularly the toms sound more like someone beating the crap out of a small cardboard box.
But if you can stand the "electronic" feel of the RZ-1 sounds, you will find them beefy and powerful enough to cut through any mix.
The only sounds I absolutely wouldn't touch with a ten feet pole, are the crash and ride cymbals - I just can't stand heavily compressed cymbal samples that suddenly die out in their prime without even trying to do some kind of loop...
The RZ-1 has a built-in mixer section so you can perform some fader riding even if you only use the stereo output jacks. But the RZ-1 also has ten separate outputs for all of you guys with a lot of mixer inputs to spare. The backlit LCD is also quite a welcome feature for those badly lit studio sessions.
The internal sequencer is very easy to work with: you create patterns and chain these patterns into songs. Ever heard that before? The internal memory holds 100 patterns and 20 songs and can be dumped to cassette tape by using an unorthodox socket labeled MT (Music Tape). It is not a MIDI Thru socket, although it looks exactly like one.
