dhilowitz

Patron Exclusive: Casio SK-1 & Friends Sample Library

Added 2024-07-18 20:52:47 +0000 UTC

Video here: https://youtu.be/Yo7I9U5UcTs

I've spent the past few weeks messing around with the Casio SK-1, a legendary sampling keyboard from the mid-80s. I had one for several years around 2001, and I remember liking it quite a bit. I'm not sure if I lost mine during a move or what happened, but at some point my SK-1 went missing. Well, this year I finally ordered another one off eBay, and I've been doing my best to make up for lost time.

The first thirteen patches are raw sounds as rendered by the SK-1's sampling engine. These give a good taste of this keyboard's crunchy 8-bit sound. The SK-1 has a maximum sample time of 1.4 seconds. This means that if you sample a plucked instrument, turn on looping, and then play a chord, you get these pleasant cascades of notes which I quite enjoy. Some of the raw samples are looping and were designed to exploit this effect, others are one-shots. The eight "warp" sounds that follow are pads created using either Microcosm, Generation Loss, or my own Refractions plug-in.