Phase distortion classics from Casio
Over the decades, Casio – makers of watches, calculators and toys – have occasionally dipped their toes into the world of professional music instruments. Perhaps because they’ve become associated with cheap toy samplers, Casio’s professional offerings are often overlooked. This is a shame, as a number of them have been serious instruments rivalling anything else on the market at the time.
Only once did a Casio instrument make any kind of significant splash, and even that one was pretty hard to take seriously… at first. Unleashed just as MIDI sequencers were becoming more popular, Casio’s diminutive CZ-101 offered an eight-voice, multitimbral competitor to Yamaha’s blockbuster digital synths. Coming in at a measly £395, it was a hot seller in 1984, despite its resemblance to the company’s other toy keyboards, with its mini-keys and shoulder strap pegs.
Under the hood, the CZ-101 offered an alternative to Yamaha’s powerful (and patented) FM synthesis. Called Phase Distortion synthesis, it was not dissimilar to that used by Yamaha, and could indeed produce the same sorts of crisp, percussive tones that made the DX series so popular. Phase Distortion produced complex waveforms by distorting a carrier wave with an angular modulation waveform. The results were different from analogue waveforms, and decidedly, deliciously digital.
The CZ-101 – and its full-sized followups – sold in blockbuster numbers that, while massive by musical instrument standards – paled against the company’s consumer electronics products. That didn’t stop ’em from producing a more advanced version of Phase Distortion (Interactive Phase Distortion) and using it as the basis of the woefully undervalued VZ-1, VZ-10M, and VZ-8M synthesisers.
Due in part to its inclusion in Jeff McClintock’s wildly popular plugin construction kit SynthEdit, phase distortion synthesis has made a big comeback in more recent years, although most of the developers in question have been content with cloning the more popular CZ variant, rather than going for the more hybrid approach of Casio’s VZ series.