Casio FZ-1

The Casio FZ-1 is sampling keyboard from 1987. It has the same famous 8 stage envelope as the CZ series but besides the amplifier envelope there is also one for the resonant analog filter using Casio’s MB87186 analog filter chips. One other difference form the CZ series is that the envelopes can loop. There are also 8 stages of crossfade that can loop at and of the start or end points allowing for a pseudo timestretch. It can operate at 32kHz, 18kHz, and 9kHz at 16 bit allowing for some crunchy samples quality with up to 58.25 seconds of sampling. It also contains basic synthesizer waveforms such as random, saw pulse, double sine, pulse, square and sawtooth. You can also hand draw waveforms with the slider or synthesize waveforms using 48 harmonic levels. A single LFO can be assigned to pitch, amplifier, or filter. There are 8 analog outputs which, when used, are hard set to each of the 8 voices. Up to 64 samples can be loaded into memory at once with 8 voices and 8 sound accessible at single time. The FZ-1 or it’s rack version, the FZ-10M has been used on famous recordings by Aphex Twin, LFO, MF Doom, Atari Teenage Riot, Coldcut, Underworld, 2 Live Crew, 808 State, Towa Tei, King Britt, John Tejada and Black Mountain Transmitter.

Our FZ-1 is equipped with a Gotek floppy drive emulator with 274 disk images including the Casio factory library, Livewire Audio, and the Soundwaves library as well as other disks shared over the internet over the last 30 years. We have the ability to read FZ-1 floppy disks and load them into the floppy drive emulator as well as loading and playing .fzf, .fzb, and .fzv files. Watch a demo here.