CASIO XWG1 SYNTHESIZER
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CASIO XWG1 SYNTHESIZER

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NOT JUST FOR THE BAND

The XW-G1 has been built as a per­for­mance syn­the­sizer, focus­ing on how the user can cre­ate sounds on the fly, rather than being put together for stu­dio pro­duc­tion. Casio are clev­erly pre­sent­ing a key­board that DJs and elec­tronic music pro­duc­ers alike will want to inte­grate into their live sets. The first thing to con­sider is that you do not need to be a clas­si­cal pianist to get a great sound out of this syn­the­sizer. It is going to snug­gle in with the other tools any mod­ern DJ uses and will be a log­i­cal addi­tion to their work­flow. The inbuilt sam­pler and looper is what makes this such a pow­er­ful tool for the mod­ern DJ and inte­grated with a con­troller or CDJ com­bi­na­tion it allows you to cre­ate some truly unique and amaz­ing tracks on the fly.

 

KILLER SOUNDS 

The sounds are gen­er­ated from Casio’s Hybrid Pro­cess­ing Sound Source, stem­ming from a 6 oscil­la­tor mono­phonic solo syn­the­sizer engine. Essen­tially, what you get is a wide range of sounds that have a real clas­sic ana­logue sound to them, but have the con­trol and flex­i­bil­ity of a mod­ern dig­i­tal synth engine. Each voice can be made up of two vir­tual ana­logue oscil­la­tors, two PCM based oscil­la­tors, a noise oscil­la­tor and an exter­nal input source defined as an oscil­la­tor. Each oscil­la­tor hav­ing its own enve­lope gen­er­a­tor and fil­ters as well as a mas­ter fil­ter across the entire sound. Before you get to the stage, you can sculpt and craft your own set of sounds to work with that have more com­plex­ity to them that any­thing you are likely to hear in a typ­i­cal sam­ple library.

 

EASE OF CONTROL

It is the power of the synth engine within the XW-G1 that gives you the awe­some sound and the clever inter­face that allows you the flex­i­bil­ity and cre­ative con­trol to bring those sounds into a live set. It then becomes a syn­the­sizer, looper, sam­pler and drum machine all bun­dled into one unit. For those DJs who love to bring their own beats to life on stage with hard­ware, this is the unit for you. If you don’t play key­board con­fi­dently, that is no rea­son to shy away from the XW-G1 either. You just need to think of it as another con­troller with a seri­ous loop engine behind it and ignore the keys in their tra­di­tional sense. If they are sim­ply treated as pads for trig­ger­ing sam­ples and beats, the ease of work­flow while in the mix just gets better.