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Casio Casiotone, 61-Key Portable Keyboard (CT-S200BK)

£42.495£84.99Clearance
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The famous VL-Tone VL-1 (1981) [2] [3] uses a method of sound synthesis based on the Walsh function. Though it’s still a relatively portable unit, the PX-S1100 is a serious instrument, with an active touch-panel display, Casio’s great-feeling Smart Scaled Hammer Action weighted keyboard and a whopping 192-note polyphony to ensure you won’t have any sustained notes dropping out. Here at MusicRadar, we are experts in our field, with many years of playing, creating and product testing between us. We live and breathe everything music gear related, and we draw on this knowledge and experience of using products in live, recording and rehearsal scenarios when selecting the products for our guides. In fact, one of our criticisms of the Lyric Creator app would be the number of presses it takes to go through the transfer process. It’d be great if Casio could streamline this a bit in an update.

The CT-S1 is a return to what Casio intended to create with the very first Casiotone keyboard: a simple instrument which looks as good as it sounds. The Casiotone line was relaunched in 2019 with the same design philosophy as Casio’s original 1980’s keyboard. Simple yet stylish instruments at an affordable price – making music accessible to everybody. For improved projection, the CT-S300 also has new, more powerful speakers. They’re powered by two 2.5W amplifiers, so you can pump up the volume if you want! Pre-1980, Casiowere known primarily as a computing company. Established in Tokyo, they had experienced success from the ‘50s onwards with their ground-breaking electronic calculator designs. However, besides a couple of sound-producing gizmos and toys, they’d never built anything even approaching a musical instrument.So, to return to our previous question, who is the CT-S1000V designed for? Despite its vocal synthesis capabilities, this still looks and feels like a home keyboard, but we think it’ll be quirky enough to find a place in a few studios, too. Touch-responsive keys are important for playing piano pieces, whilst a pitch bend wheel is great for synth-style lead parts. If performing is a priority for you, then the CT-S300 is a good choice.

Our nominated carrier is Parcel Force. Deliveries are made Monday – Friday between 9.00am – 6.00pm (excluding Bank Holidays). Adding performance-focussed functionality, the CT-S300 is perfect for those seeking more expressive capabilities. It retains all of the features of the CT-S200, but with improved playability. This model adds touch-responsive keys, with two different levels of sensitivity plus the ability to turn touch off. There’s also a pitch-bend wheel – letting you add flair and expression to your performances. If the vocal stuff was all that the CT-S1000V had then you’d probably feel a little short-changed, but fortunately, it’s also an excellent portable keyboard. There’s a great variety of sounds, and while the keyboard action can sometimes feel a light to get the most out of them (when you're playing the electric pianos, for example), you’ve got everything you need.With the modern Casiotone range now up to seven models, we’ve decided to run you through their development, and help you figure out which one might be right for you.

Tempted by a Casiotone? Or want to explore the rest of our keyboards? Follow the links below to explore our full range. This is a ground-breaking technology, which revolutionises the process of adding vocals to music. You only have to write your lyrics into Casio’s LyricCreator app, and then you can perform them on the keyboard – choosing from 100 different lyric tones! Harness the power of classic talkboxes and vocoders, or even create choral parts. Find out more about Casio Vocal Synthesis here. Buy any of the best Casio keyboards or digital pianos and you’ll be granted free access to the Casio Music Academy. Designed by music teachers, this online portal combines video tutorials with an app that connects to your keyboard via a USB cable or the optional WU-BT10 Bluetooth dongle. While you play, it’ll analyse your performance and show you how to improve, step by step. How we choose the best Casio keyboards Casio’s flagship CT-X5000 is a superb keyboard - after all, it’s made this guide - but it comes with a hefty price tag and a feature set aimed squarely at performers. If you have a little less cash and no desire to perform beyond your living room, then the almost identical CT-X300 makes a lot of sense. It’s slightly less feature rich, but does trump its better endowed brother in one respect. First and foremost, we are musicians, and we want other players to find the right product for them. So we take into careful consideration everything from budget to feature set, ease of use and durability to come up with a list of what we can safely say are the best Casio keyboards on the market right now.Arranger keyboards often ship with hundreds of different instrument presets, representing practically every instrument that exists and probably quite a few that don’t. Bear in mind that quantity isn’t always a measure of quality, though – it’s far better to have fewer usable voices than hundreds you’ll never bother with, especially if you’re more in the market for a digital piano than a portable keyboard. For more information on the differences between the two types of instrument, see our digital piano vs keyboard article here. It adds 200 more tones (800 in total), 43 more rhythms (243 in total), and allows 50 user rhythms. There are 24 reverbs, 12 choruses, 15 delays, 10 EQ pre-sets and 100 DSP pre-sets! On top of this, the polyphony is upped to 64 notes. Special mention should go to the speakers, which we’re led to believe are the same as those on the excellent Casiotone CT-S1. They deliver a surprising amount of punch, and are certainly good enough to be used for listening to music in a bedroom (or similar). The Bluetooth audio connectivity makes this very convenient, too. It utilised “vowel-consonant” synthesis – a form of subtractive synthesis using filter patterns based on human speech tones. To select one of the 29 pre-set voices, you simply pressed the tone select button and then any of the white keys on the keyboard. This uncomplicated layout made the Casiotone extremely simple to navigate.

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