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Average rating:
4.1 out of 5
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Bought this for $5 at a flea market. My guitar player laughed at it when I enthusiastically showed it to him. After fixing the battery leads & spendign about 1/2 hr reprogramming some of the presets; this thing completely blew his mind, when he heard the deep ring mod like electric piano sounds that I was able to get out of a few minor adjustments to the Vibe patch. It probably helped that the CZ-101 was playing thru a spring reverb. It reminds of the juno 60/106 at times & its known for being Fm-ish; how many other synths (from this era) can go from a low deep analog/acoustic piano sound to a lo-fi waspy intermodulated beast that sounds as if it was circuit bent by Raymond Scott?
I love you $5 CZ-101.
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If you find one for 150$ BUY IT. In a momment of weakness I sold mine and I had to buy a Micron (Alesis) to replace the sound scapes that I lost by sellin' it.
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This was the first real programmable synth I ever got acquainted with.
From the surface it's got a Juno-106 simplicity about its appearance but beneath it will really fool you what you can do with it. At the age of 17 in 1995 with barely any programming experience prior to playing this I just looked at the parameters and scratched my head...it has envelopes that go on and on and on and on and on and on and on an on....for the DCO, DCW (waveshaper...kinda like a filter) and DCA.
They actually have a manual out there 'How to program the DX7 and CZ-101' in the same book...too bad I spotted it 10 years after having my uneducated approach to it.
The goods: white noise, ring mod, very tight portamento, sonically rich waveshapes, 4 sounds at once! Who cares if you can only store 16 sounds. The instrument has a very spacey quality to it...you can create some very raucious, industrial synth drums on it with the LFO, white noise and ring mod combined. I might buy one just 'cuz...but I might not.
...Did I mention it had knobs on the side to attach a guitar strap? That'd be the reason I'd buy it...its light and fun to play...standin' up.
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Hi folks
I've had the CZ101 for a few years now, and recently discovered that despite it's primitive midi spec, it does however recieve PORTAMENTO TIME over midi, which enabled me to make some seriously wacky scream type sounds, and oh yeah setting it up as 4-part multitimbral is easy, now if only I could do sysex from Ableton Live and tweak that "filter". I've thought about selling it but like I can't! I've made much better sounds with it than my TX7.
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The sounds are amazing...you go through programming it and you think "wow - Boards of Canada sound, this lead of such and such a techno classic etc". The presets make it sound like a crap DX synth but once you get programming it's totally unique.
The only drawback is its medieval MIDI spec...starts in Channel 1, can't really send sysex, no velocity etc. If Casio or someone did what Yamaha did with their flagship pile of crap the DX7 and re-released it, not as a groovebox exactly but as a cheap module with better MIDI and more memories, some knobs, maybe slightly simpler envelopes and a simple-ish arpeggiator, and perhaps a chorus unit, and some much better presets, it would sell thousands.
With its lack of decent MIDI and limited memories, it's more a "play it over MIDI then record sequence to sampler" type synth, which is just about OK. Top marks for the sound, but a tad inconvenient. Then, do you want convenience or amazing sounds?
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