This is definitely one of the most interesting Casio keyboards, because it features a genuine analogue synthesizer filter with filter envelope and cut- off/ resonance control sliders, lots of accompaniment variations and separate volume sliders. Additionally it has a wonderful 'stereo chorus' rotary speaker/ leslie simulator that produces a great sort of 'hemi- sync' mind machine effect with stepless adjustable speed, which makes the thing perfect for brain wave synchronization features in psychedelic meditation or tekkno trance music. A smaller version of this instrument with midsize keys and no built-in speakers was released as Casio MT-400V.
BioTek 405 LS Operator's Manual.pdf. BioTek - 405 LS by BioTek. Download PDF. Product Details. Forums; Documents; Videos; News; Request a quote Request Parts Add. CASIO CT-6000 (CT6000) Casiotone New Manuals CASIO CT-510 (CT510) Casiotone New Manuals SUZUKI AN650 K3 Burgman New Manuals KENWOOD KX-W1090 New Manuals. View / Download the Complete Manual Errata Click the link above to view the complete manual. The file size for the complete manual is 8.41 MB. Individual chapters and appendices may be downloaded below. Maintenance Manual 808KB - EN. Electric Basses 2016 6.6MB - EN. Electric Basses 2014 3.3MB - EN. Electric Basses 2012 2.3MB - EN. Electric Basses 2011 2.9MB - EN. Electric Basses 2011 (Additional instruction) 2.9MB - EN. Electric Basses 2010 3.1MB - EN. Electric Basses 2009 2.7MB - EN. Electric Basses 2008 2.9MB - EN. Electric Basses 2007 3.0MB. Casiotone refers to a series of home electronic keyboards released by Casio Computer Co., Ltd. In the early 1980s. In 2019 the series was revived with the launch of three new keyboards. 1 Casio claims that the Casiotone 201 (CT-201) was 'the first electronic keyboard with full-size keys that anyone could afford'.
All sliders of this instrument are real analogue potentiometers and thus stepless. The stereo chorus LFO can also modulate the filter in 'wah wah' mode, which makes the typical 'wokachika' sound known from certain 1970th funk (?) musics. The great accompaniment unit has 4 bass and 4 chord variations and the same unique, dark and sonorously droning squarewave bass tones like the 'organ' sound of the Hing-Hon EK-001. In fingered chord mode the accompaniment plays the more notes the more keys are pressed, and this works even perfectly with all non- chord key combinations, which permits very versatile accompaniment sound patterns. (This flexible behaviour is absolute no matter of course, see Yamaha PSS-390 for an annoyingly stubborn example.) And despite this instrument has already many built-in features, there are even still lots of additional keyboard matrix eastereggs to discover, which makes it perfect for circuit bending.
main features:
eastereggs:There are tons of great keyboard matrix eastereggs; for details see below.
notes:
The analogue percussion of the CT-410V sound rather unspectacular (no booming tekkno base or the like), but the decay time of all drums can be adjusted with trimmer potentiometers on the main PCB, and like all analogue drums they can be certainly modified in various ways.
The 20 main voices are fixed presets and not user- definable, but there are various mode switches (vibrato, sustain etc.) those modify them. The main voice generally sounds a bit dull when not sent through the synth filter; this has partly to do with dull built-in speakers, but there is also a 1nF capacitor which unnecessarily muffles all timbres - throwing it out is strictly recommended and will improve the sound significantly. (In opposite to this my Casio MT-45 sounds very bright by default, despite it has the same accompaniment CPU.) The main voice sounds of the CT-410V consist of 2 mixed squarewave tone suboscillators with different multipulses and different digital volume envelopes, those are (depending on the preset) muffled by 4 different filter capacitors. In the bass range many sounds turn into a more or less buzzy, sonorous purring drone, which is a characteristic style element of squarewave based instruments. These basses can resemble some of the famous POKEY sound effects on Atari XL homecomputers and are very different from the gradually duller and duller growing sine wave bass behaviour of average Yamaha FM keyboard sounds. When sustain is switched off, all sounds stop almost immediately after releasing the key, and the sound presets itself also contain neither vibrato nor tremolo.
Particularly the piano and the ringing 'mandolin' timbres sound really dull, and also the too narrow pulse width of the mandolin makes it sound very unrealistic and buzzy at low notes. As usual with squarewave instruments, the dull 'trumpet' sounds very artificial (but a much better trumpet timbre can be generated using the synth filter). Most realistic sound the organ, flute and clarinet presets. The 'funny' preset is a sort of rough digital slap bass (creaky picked e-bass) which sounds like 'ennng!' (possibly it was initially intended to be called 'funky', but sounded to artificial for this?). The 'cosmic tone' preset sounds simply like a plain saxophone tone, thus I guess that its strange name was initially rather related to its 3 switchable envelope variants (those are normally not available on this instrument but can be added by an easy modification), because they turn it into a slowly duller fading spacey synth lead 'meow' timbre, which makes audible use of the crossfading between the 2 subvoices. Both sounds belong to the brightest and most interesting ones of this instrument.
Technically the CT-410V is completely mono, besides that the main voice is optionally post- processed by the 'stereo chorus' circuit, which makes a pitch shifted version of it alternatingly pan left and right to approximate a rotary speaker effect. Either the main voice ('tone') or rhythm or bass + chord or a white noise source (chopped by the rhythm) can be post- processed by the analogue low- pass synthesizer filter.
The filter has sliders for cut- off, resonance and an envelope generator with sliders for attack, decay and sustain level. As usual, cut- off removes all frequencies above a certain value (i.e. muffles the sound or even mutes it completely when set very low), while resonance rises the frequencies near the cut- off value and this way a high resonance setting makes the timbre more hollow or metallic. The filter envelope modulates the cut- off value. In main voice ('tone') mode it is started by the begin of each new note (ignoring the key press duration), and because there is only one monophonic filter, during polyphonic play the filter envelope affects all currently held down notes simultaneously, which permits an interesting gate effect because it can make held down notes fade dull or silent (by the filter envelope) and then sound again with full brightness during each new played note by the restarting filter envelope. Unlike this, when the filter is assigned to 'bass/ chord', its envelope does not restart with each new chord sound, but seems to ignore new bass/ chord notes so long its envelope is still in the attack or decay phase. Thus with fast rhythm tempo and slow envelope settings it makes rather a sort of 'wokachika' sound (like known from 1970th funk(?) music and the oldest 'Sesame Street' theme) instead of exactly following the chords. This way the accompaniment pattern gets differently stressed/ phrased by changing tempo or attack/ decay setting, which provides an interesting effect for tekkno. Instead of this envelope generator, the cut- off value can be alternatively modulated by the triangular wave LFO of the stereo chorus (no matter if the chorus effect is currently on or off) by selecting 'wah wah', which makes a continuous filter sweep that can (depending on the cut- off slider setting) result in differently strong effects from mild tremolo to 'wokachika' or chopping the sound. (Unlike a normal volume envelope, all these filter envelopes fade the sound not only quieter but also make it grew duller by reducing the trebles first.) As well the stereo chorus as the filter of this instrument have a bit thin and slightly harsh sounding cheap op-amp chip timbre. In unmodified state the filter permits no really high resonance level, and at full resonance the signal looses quite much bass intensity. Fortunately some simple circuit bending helps here to make it oscillate nicely and get half- way reasonable acid house sounds out of it.
There is also even a filter envelope input jack, which was originally intended to plug in the Casio BFC-1 breathe filter controller - a small black box with a mouthpiece, with that the filter cut- off value should be controlled by blowing into it like playing a wind instrument. (Likely this feature was intended as a competitive product to a similar breathe input device of Yamaha's famous DX7 FM synthesizer, which also had a special input jack for it.) Unfortunately neither rhythm nor accompaniment are user programmable, and there is also neither a built-in sequencer nor MIDI capabilities.
modifications:
Especially after these modifications, the CT-410V constitutes a respectable sounding analogue synthesizer that can do many similar effects like known from early Jean Michael Jarre works; with the arpeggio mixed into the main voice and routed through the synth filter, you can e.g. get the typical style of chinking atmospheric melody clouds known from these records. Unfortunately nothing is programmable, which limits the instrument to its standard rhythms and accompaniments, although they permit many variations. (Without any sequencer you also soon wish a 2nd pair of hands to crank at the knobs while playing on it, but early Moog synthesizers also had none anyway, and Jarre played live in spite of this. ;-) )
I read in a forum that when Casio developed their first soundchips, they were urged to transmit their digital waveform data between CPU and soundchip in an odd format based on incremental values to prevent conflicts with a digital pipe organ patent by the church organ manufacturer Allen, who had introduced the banal concept of adding a digital envelope to digital waveform samples. I am not sure if the simple squarewave sound of the D931C is really affected by this, but the shitshot distortion may have to do with improper increment sums those cause a DC offset on the output waveform that exceeds the DAC range. The forum article was written by Robin Whittle and I have included it here for educational purpose because it mentions the D931C chip and may help to bring more light into the sound synthesis technology of historical Casio keyboards:
I had downloaded a sound demo record of the Casiotone 202, which was the direct successor of the Casiotone 201, but the 202 there seemed to have far more natural (non- squarewave) sounding timbres than my CT-410V (D930G/ D931C chip set like MT-65). But now I think this was likely rather caused by either post- processed studio recording or clever use of limited octave ranges, because my (later bought) own specimen of both keyboards sound fairly similar, beside that the 201 can even detune its 2 suboscillators against each other to produce a chorus effect. My Casio MT-70 otherwise produces all of its sounds by mixing instead of squarewaves only 2 very dull tones (apparently digital sine waves), despite it outputs the sounds the same way digitally through a resistor array DAC like the CT-410V. My Casio MT-60 otherwise sounds much like the CT-410V, thus Casio apparently produced multiple differently sounding variants of this early sound synthesis hardware, which (at least with the Casiotone 202) had the fancy advertisement name 'Consonant- Vowel' synthesis.
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By space reasons and because I can not play well on these huge piano keys, I originally had intended to buy the smaller Casio MT-400V instead of the CT-410V, but much like with the insanely overpriced Casio CZ-101, at eBay they were sold only for moon prices (200€ etc.), thus I bought the fullsize CT-410V instead (which seems to be even more rare). But by the lack of internal speakers, a MT-400V would have likely taken as much space, and regarding the large PCBs inside my specimen, it would have been likely much more difficult to install here all the switches and potentiometers I added to my CT-410V. Also don't confuse the MT-400V with the Casio MT-800, which looks similar but has no synthesizer, a stubborn and banal accompaniment and only 12 preset sounds.
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Casio MT-400V (This is just an eBay picture; I don't own one.)
There are plenty of other instruments in the D930G/ D931C hardware class, those are usually cheap and easy to find at eBay, but they are all missing the synth filter and often many other features. Such instruments can be recognized by the rhythm and sound preset names (the sound names 'funny' and 'cosmic tone' are easy to remember) and also the count of 12 rhythms and 20 sounds and the possible presence of locking switches for multiple chord, bass and/ or arpeggio variants hint to it.
The CT-410V/ MT-400V is by my knowledge the only Casio instrument with a genuine analogue synthesizer filter and analogue realtime sliders. Someone told me by e-mail that also the Casio HT series synthesizers HT-700, HT-3000, HT-6000, HZ-600 had analogue filters, but these are MIDI synths without realtime sliders. The HT-700 and HT-3000 had basically quite similar sound generation like the CT-410V, but with different and fully programmable accompaniment and PCM rhythm. The HT-6000 was the flagship of these instruments and had for each polyphony channel even an own filter and per channel 4 detuneable suboscillators those can be set to different velocity curves. I initially thought that the HT 'analogue modelling' series would be virtual analogue and internally based on Casio's digital FM variant phase distortion (there were many such rumours), but he told me that the PCB of his HT-6000 contains indeed analogue filter hardware with 'NJM2090' chips and many trimmers.
Other keyboards with the same chip set like the CT-410V (but no synth filter) and 49 midsize keys include the Casio MT-65/ MT-68, the CK-500 (MT-65 with 2 cassette decks, radio, only 12 preset sounds) the Casio MT-100 (with equalizer) and the Casio MT-45/ MT-46 (only same accompaniment, not main voice). Fullsize keyboards include the Casiotone 404/ 405 (fake woodgrain case like Casiotone 401), the Casiotone 610 (or CT-610?, similar with 61 keys and stereo chorus, woodgrain and silver version exists), the similar CT-620 , likely the Casio CT-605 (61 keys, mono), the Casio CT-430 (49 keys, stereo) and the Casio CT-310 (mono, 49 keys, only 12 sounds but same accompaniment - all seen on eBay). Likely also the Casiotone 7000 (beige metal case with 61 fullsize keys, digitally programmable stereo chorus effects, sequencer with tape storage, LCD display, same 12 preset rhythms) is based on this hardware class, although its 20 semi- OBS preset sounds include some different names - possibly because these are controlled through an external CPU. Also the Casio MT-210 seems to be member of this hardware class (49 midsize keys, stereo chorus, functions like MT-65 without the envelope variation buttons); only few of the 20 preset sound names are changed (likely by hardwired envelope variation settings) and on eBay someone claimed it had PCM rhythm, thus possibly the drum trigger outputs of its accompaniment CPU control an external sample based rhythm IC. I first also though that Casio MT-800 and MT-85/ MT-86 (with ROM-Pack and key lighting) would be in this hardware class, but its CPU seems to have a different software number and thus is only the same family. A successor of the CT-410V/ MT-400V was the Casio HT-700/ Hohner KS 49 midi (has MIDI but unfortunately sounds cold and lacks realtime controls).
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