From Markweisgram@aol.com Thu Aug 28 21:00:59 2003
Subject:The new Casios have "drawbars"

I guess it had to happen....I was in Guitar Center yesterday looking for
replacement for my old trusty ( stolen ) Yamaha PSR 220 when I happened upon the
new Casio 3000 series portable. I was surprised to see that it had programmable
organ patches that utilized a virtual drawbar feature. I hadn't seen any one
on this list post regarding this - here are my impressions.

I will
say that it was rather hard to figure out the drawbar set up. There are these
tiny little cursor thingies that you have to move to get different sounds. You
also have to kind of scroll over to get to each drawbar but there are nine
cursors for the drawbars and also there is programmable percussion (2nd and 3rd
harmmonic) programmable key click , percussion volume , decay time and a
leslie simulator. Plus a whole bunch of effects.

After tweaking around a bit I was able to come up with some
sounds. The first setting I came across as a preset was an 888000000 with third
percussion. I didn't sound too bad ... the percussion has quite a "thunk" to it .
I tried to adjust the decay time and percussion volume but didn't have much
luck.
However - the second harmonic
percussion sounds pretty good - in fact it struck me as being fairly
usable. Also the non percussion sounds arent too bad. This thing can pump out some
bass - at least through headphones. It seems to me that in some applications
it might work O.K. as a sub keyboard , though there is no chorus vibrato. The
Leslie sim probably isn't the greatest but it sounded pretty good on some
gospelish - type presets. There were also some internal EQ setups that may be
helpful to reduce shrillness, boost bass etc.
The Rhoades piano patch in this
didn't sound too bad either, incidentally. I didn't care for the acoustic piano
but then again neither the Electro or Roland clones do much for me in this
regard. There were tons more features it has that I didn't have time to explore
and can't comment on.

The 76 key version of this was
selling for $300.00 . There is also a $200.00 one with 61 keys that also has
the drawbar feature but I didn't see it there . It may have some usefulness -
personally I always have liked having a portable for playing outdoors or to
take out of the house to do some arranging. So there may be some things that it
could be good for. At least it is noteworthy to see Casio offer something a
little more serious in the organ department than we have seen from a portable
in the past.Hopefully others (Yamaha ?) will follow suit . It would be
interesting to hear what some of the rest of you think of these ....that is, if some
of you can bear to leave your Hammond museums unattended for an afternoon.

Mark


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