MATRIXSYNTH

Casio CZ-1 Spelunking - CZ-1 Easter Eggs

It looks like the Casio CZ-1 has some functional Easter Eggs in it. If you are not familiar with Easter Eggs, in software they are basically hidden or previously unknown features or other functionality. They can be credit rolls of the people that worked in the software, secret levels, a flight simulator in the old version of Microsoft Excell, or in the Casio CZ-1, extra functionality.

"I was in the process of making a program that would let me edit Casio CZ-1 sysex dumps. A Casio CZ-1 is a synthesizer. I wanted the program to also be able to take advantage of any known easter eggs in the CZ-1. I was reading about these easter eggs on the Sealed web pages. Those pages were the basis of all of the studies I have been doing. Without them I wouldn't have even started.

However, those pages left me with a lot of questions, so I started doing bit-by-bit analyses of my CZ-1. I wanted to do a really systematic study of those easter eggs, and to document them better so that they will be more usable. I was originally just doing this for my own interest, but I've wasted so much time on it now that I figure I ought to make it available to everyone.

The easter eggs I'm working on concern the waveform types, the "window function", and the modulation type. For example: There are more basic waveforms than the Casio documentation admits to. The "resonant" waves are created by passing a certain waveform through a window function, and if you manipulate the window function separately you can create all sorts of new waves. Also, if you program the CZ-1 from the front panel you can only combine certain waves. But when you use sysex you can combine any wave with any other wave and run it through any of the windows. And lastly, there are more types of modulation available than Casio has documented. All of these things were written up on the Sealed website, and I just wanted to do more thorough documentation and samples of those things."

Click here for more detail. This one sent my way via swissdoc.

Roland D-50 demonstration

YouTube via VintSynth.
"One of ther most beautiful synthesizers of the late eighties can still impress."

blosync2

Another Waldorf Blofeld demo via Stefan Trippler: blosync2.mp3

The Mill

via Chris Muir:

"A granular file player. Great for warping XMas music, enabling you to enjoy songs in a new way. This current version does some calculations based on a 44.1K sample rate, so if you use other sample rates things will be a little wacky.

There are two versions here, a Max patch and a stand-alone Mac OS X application. If you are on a Mac and you don't have Max, you can run the application. If you're on Windows and don't have Max, you can run the patch version, if you install the Max Runtime for Windows."

link

Roland System 100

via Aliens Project

Thorsten live in Frankfurt 2007

click here for a couple more shots on the excellent Tangerine Dream site, The Archive Plus.

its some kind of delicious mess.

flickr by BlacKSacrificE

full size

click here for mouse overs of the gear.

HC KSS Synth Demos

Swissdoc sent me a link to the HC KSS Synth Demos thread on Harmony Central. The thread contains a massive list of synth demos started by clustorchord back on 10/11/2004. Do check it out.