You may need to learn music, however no one needs to spend a thousand {dollars} on a keyboard solely to appreciate they hate it. Most individuals purchase a newbie keyboard to pound out “Hey Jude,” the type of plasticky mannequin that you just most likely keep in mind from center college. They work superb as instruments to fabricate sound together with your fingers, however the precise tones go away a bit to be desired.
That’s why I’ve loved my time with the Casio CT-S1000V. It’s a glossy $470 mannequin that acts as a superb newbie keyboard, however with one significantly cool occasion trick: You can program lyrics into it and have the keyboard sing for you. It’s a rad instrument for these of us with voices like indignant crows.
Between strong building, good sounds, and an easy-to-navigate interface, I feel this board is the right place for freshmen to start out. The vocal synthesis engine is cool sufficient that even die-hard synth nerds will wish to fiddle once they come examine your progress.
Classic Casio
Vintage Casio fashions are beloved by indie darlings like Mac Demarco for a motive. These fundamental, utilitarian keyboards sound as nostalgic as they’re purposeful. Like many Casios earlier than it, this one has an honest keyboard and 800 built-in sounds, with all the things from boring piano to spacey synths represented. You additionally get 243 rhythms to play together with, do you have to want some inspiration.
You’d be shocked how far sounds have come because you final messed with a keyboard at Guitar Center earlier than Covid. The workforce at Casio has included some legitimately nice sounds, stuff you’d have paid hundreds of {dollars} for earlier than the iPhone period (hear samples under).
You can plug the keyboard into an amp or use it as a MIDI keyboard with a pc, however I truly preferred simply utilizing the built-in audio system on the highest. It makes it straightforward to jam together with music, or to rapidly pattern sounds with out the trouble of turning on an amp or opening the Casio Music Space app (which works for iOS and Android and pairs to the keyboard).
The included LCD show works nicely in darkish rooms, and it provides you fairly granular management over all the things you may wish to alter when enjoying. You can assign two knobs on the highest left of the board to do varied filters, results, and EQ strikes, and there’s a very usable pitch-bend wheel on the far left aspect, for whenever you wish to really feel like Herbie Hancock within the Nineteen Seventies.
Getting Connected
Photograph: Casio
You can get sound info out of the keyboard 4 methods: by way of the aforementioned audio system, a headphone jack, stereo ¼-inch outputs, or by way of USB. You also can use the keyboard as a sampler in your favourite music, with the power to seize sounds from Bluetooth audio and use an inner six-track sequencer to line up a beat.
Once you’re plugged in, you may simply fiddle and save any sounds that you just discover you want for later. Speaking of mucking round and discovering cool sounds, I actually did fall in love with the brand new vocal synthesis engine. It’s straightforward to kind lyrics into the Casio Lyric Creator app (iOS, Android) after which switch complete songs of lyrics to the keyboard.
If you actually hate to sing, otherwise you significantly love Daft Punk or Peter Frampton, you’ll be in love. You can use 22 completely different vocal sounds and manipulate them with a reasonably broad number of results and different sound parameters. The vocal synth is polyphonic, which implies you may play actually cool harmonies (hear under) over your individual phrases.
