Casio SK-1 and Friends [Patreon Exclusive] [Decent Sampler]

Description

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. 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 put through the Casio SK-1 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.

Have fun!

– Dave

The sample library works with the free Decent Sampler player plugin. Download it here.