Yamaha CS1x

Good, with the blue book. I am desperatly trying to figure out
if you can apply more than the two knobs to a softsynth such
as reaktor.. Should be possible, somehow.. I hope...

Good little synth for its price. Would make a nice controller if the midi didnt try and take over, it had aftertouch, and the knobs
weree more assignable (to softsynths such as reality/reaktor :)

Very nice for the price

Life in plastic can be fantastic

Hmm blue book ? What blue book?

If lost or stolen I would probably go for a more controller orientated synth, something that was easy to assign knobs to
soft synths such as reaktor reality, and VST2 ones..

If anyone knows how to do this, please email me psi@musician.org
Specifically is ther a way, and a softsyth that will allow you to assign more than two of the knobs to a continuous controller.. How
about breath and foot ?

For the money it is one of the best keyboards you can purchase if you are into electronic music

Has a killer performance section. All parameters have to be assigned.

It is very expressive and the filters sound great!!

Has not given me any problems other than not being able to save edited parameters successfully. I still haven't read the manual.(It was in French?)

Never had to deal with them

I am very happy with the presets as well as the editing parameters!

editing is a breeze. if you have any trouble, there's the blue book, though i didn't see much need for it. manual explains pretty much everything you can't figure out from 30 minutes playing around.

knobs. knobs are what make the keyboard. this thing would be worth about half as much w/o the knobs. midi... had no trouble sequencing with a 707, haven't tried anything more in-depth. built in arpeggiator is fun, wish it was programmable though.

it's a piece of gear made for electronic music, it does bleeps, chirps, rises, whatever.
don't buy it expecting a 303 emulator. if i was born deaf and blind, and was sitting in another room down the hall from where this was being played, it still wouldn't sound like a 303.

no idea. it hasn't done anything evil yet.

it's a good entry level synth for those looking to make any kind of electronic music. if it was lost or stolen, i'd be sad, then i'd save my $$$ and buy a waldorf q.

Had lots of problems getting it to work properly with the rest of my stuff. (Could be just my unit, or the fact that my manual was in french ..que??) So you should't weigh this comment in to heavily..

BAH...

Some sounds were ok. You will NOT get any wicked 303 basslines or Fat basses though.

Fear the plastic. Knobs feel like they are going to come off. Very unsolid feel over it all in all. Handle it with care.

Never dealt with them..

It has been a while since i sold mine, and NOT considering the fact that it's as plastic as lego I just felt I REALLY had to comment on some of the previews. What ticks me off is that people comment it with things like "nordlead killer"..&#/&" NO WAY DUDE.
Its an average synth with average sounds, and there is no way in hell it can compete with the "virtual-anologue-monsters". Unless you find it REALLY cheap, stay the hell away from it. Buy something else.. Cant think of any genre where you cant find a better solution for the price..Piece of plastic virtual-analogue-wannabee synth, made in the same spirit as the MC-303. Point is, if it is not obvious, DO NOT buy this for its "Nordlead-killer" qualities, it has none. I like the color though.. :)

Its is VERY easy to make sounds on the synth, but not as easy from the computer.

It has got what i needs! But the midi sucks!

The sounds are really GREAT!
GREAT pads
GREAT leads

Evolving sounds!

It is not always predictable! Sometimes it does stuff that it was not supposed to do.

Its a very good synth! The best for the money! Nice color! Nice sounds! COOL SYNTH!

ive had mine for a year now, its not too shabby, but i know for a fact that yamaha can do a lot better. most presets suck, but i never use presets anyways. you can get cool sounds if you tweak the originals, though, but you cant create sounds, you have to base them upon the presets, and you cant save sounds in multi mode. it does serve a decent purpose, i play industrial, so its good for it. its based on dance, techno, and rappish shit, but i have gotten some fucking sick sounds out of it. nothing spectacular about the effects, but theyre useable. for the money, its a decent piece of gear, and i can get really warm sounds out of it, but thats because i make my own. its good to start off with, but ive played better. its annoying to sample (i dont sequence shit, sample it all), but youll have that. i also use a roland jp-8000, and im buying a nord lead 2 really soon, they both put the cs1x to shame, but its still a decent synth, and i dont think i would sell it unless i got a real good deal.

I think it's pretty easy to use...the cushiony rubbber buttons to change parameters could have been a knob...but I'm pretty sure you can Assign one to it. The 2 Assign knobs are great...I have Assign 1 as Arpeggiator tempo and it sounds pretty spiffy at gigs. Its really easy to use and even a complete moron could probably figure it out in a couple days...and that's if they have only 2 brain cells and one is lost and the other went to find it.

Manual was good. Didn't need it much. Just to find out how to restore factory settings. Did it once...my method of learning is to open it, mess around with anything I can and then restore. Complicated, but it gets the job done.

I didn't like it's nasty little one-performance-at-a-time secret...bad, Yamaha, bad.

No expansion that I could see...the effects were pretty good though...lots of distortion, flange, etc...a whole mess...really easy.

Velocity...I don't think aftertouch though.

In/Out/Thru. No sequencer. Decent Arpeggiator.

The synth sounds are great. I love the pads and strings. Definately a techno/trance/alternative board. STAY AWAY FROM PIANO! I really don't like it. It's icky. I like the onboard effects and knobs, but stay away from the Multi bank....*Shudder*

I have gigged without a backup...it's sturdy...but I baby it...I've dropped it twice...once on carpet, the other on concrete...and all I got was minor scratches on the bottom panel. It's solid. I can feel the edit knob loosening...not bad for a year and half though...don't drop it on the blue part...it's sturdy, but it's still just hard plastic.

I'd probably buy a newer version if lost or stolen, unless I could find a cheap (key word) used one. I also have an RM1x and it's great and I recently got a Roland JX-305. Love 'em all. It's a great board and the pads rule. If you don't agree...well...I like them.

Ok ease of use is amazing, it takes no time to learn. The main four knobs (attack, release, cutoff, resounce) can utomaticly make some major difforences in the voices, and with a few seconds you can compleatly distroy the sound with the actual filters and bypass.

Shhhh dont ask about polyphony... Its pretty bad, you can use 11 standerd midi voices and one cool synth sound. Defenatly a lead synth only. Plus dont try to add it to a midi chain, it picks up and plays all channels, and they cant be turned off...NOW THAT SUX. Its not expandeble, but it doesnt need to be, you can almost emmulate anything you want with it if you take the time. The only thing it could realy use is a noise filter then it could rival almost any true anolog. The arpeggiator is great, but then again thats what the board was designed for. If your an underbudget, creative synth player this is a grat sound matchine, and hay if you need more polyphony buy a dat and sample the hell outa the sounds in soundforge and drop them as wave files into cakewalk..right?

As I said befor...the sounds are phat and intence, unfortunatly its a little quieter then normal synths so you'll have to turn it up higher on the mixing board. Its a trance, happy hardcore synth but I use it for EBM/Industrial and experamental noize. Its very good at following your playing style and its volocity is great.

I can fully depend on it, and would easly gig with ot a back up. Even a huge tour.

Who knows, Yamahas always busy

If it was lost or stolen I dont know if I would replace it, for the money it really cant be touched at all, but now I need something polyphonicIf i could afford to replace it I would in a heart beat. I have been programming for about 4 years, I have access to a Nord lead 2 a JP8000, a Dance Planet, Juno 106 and a Korg Prophacy. I think it does well in combat against any of thieses boards. I love my little blue box so I rate it high.

Dead easy. It's a digital synth but there are knobs on the front for filter resonance/freq, attack, release, and two patch-specific knobs, so you can do a lot in realtime (nice touch). Front-panel patch editing is very easy, thanks to lots of info on the front of the case and a nicely intuitive interface. Presets are pretty okay, they give you a good idea of the range of things this little guy is capable of. Manual is nice, certainly better than a damn Roland manual. I didn't find a patch editor to be necessary at all.

Keyboard action is about what you'd expect for $350 -- servicable, but not great. Built-in effects are not that useful; delay and reverb are good, chorus and flange seem weak. They're patch-specific, too.
No expansion possibilities that I can see.
MIDI implementation is fairly standard; velocity and aftertouch. Unfortunately when it's in GM mode it responds to EVERY MIDI CHANNEL ALL THE TIME and I have found no way to turn that off! In "Performance" mode (the real patches) there's no multitimbrality that I can see, but that doesn't really affect me for what I use it for.
No sequencer, but come on, doesn't everyone use these things with computers these days? However the on-board arpeggiator is pretty okay -- it'll lock to MIDI clock. You can't define your own arpeggio pattern but the built-in ones are pretty servicable for techno applications.

GM instruments are so-so. The "performance" patches are built from the basic waveforms of the GM instruments, modified with filters, ADSR envelope, LFOs and so forth.
What you end up with is some very nice evolving pad sounds, good analog simulations, some good leads, really nice vox-type patches. You can do a lot with patch editing just by fooling around -- this eats up hours of my time. :)
Sound-wise this is a GREAT choice for someone who wants to get into electronica on a low budget, much better than the other possibilities I looked at in this price range (the DJX, MC303, etc). This is a real synth.

Well, I already broke a knob off the thing. It seems pretty flimsy. I'd gig without a backup but only because I'm poor. I've had it about 6 months and have had to powercycle it a couple times because sound just stopped coming out for no obvious reason.

Dunno. I've not heard good things about Yamaha support.

Overall this is a GREAT board for what I wanted it for -- experimentation with electronica/trance/techno. You have the opportunity to play around with an easy interface and get the sounds you like. However, unless you're using a computer workstation with this, I wouldn't make it your only keyboard, due to the (apparent) lack of multitimbrality.

What I love: the wide variety of sounds, the easy tinkering-style editing, the realtime control knobs!
What I hate: lack of multitimbrality, the knob I broke off.

Right now the CS1x is the main controller in my setup (I now have an Orbit and an old TX81z to go with it, whee) and it makes a great cheap controller, as well as a good sound module in its own right. If it was multitimbral I'd be giving it a 10 for the price/performance ratio. But this guy makes me want to make music, and that's what counts at the end of the day.

i think the presets sound pretty good. you can make a great techno/trance album with the presets alone. the drums are a little weak but are usable for the most part. editing is pretty easy. it's pretty straight forward, but the cs1x edit program(shareware) will take the sounds to new heights.

it has a great effects unit. everything's there: flanger, phaser, delay, reverbs, etc. the built in effects came a o.k. sound great. you only get 128 user patches, but i think there is a way to dump them to your computer. i don't know, never tried it. it has an appegiator wich isn't programable at all so i find it mostly useless. no sequencer to speak of. it has six knobs wich are midi contrllable which is terrific for controlling my softsynths.

doesn't really concentrate on acoustic sounds(mostly analogish), but i personaly like the organs and pianos included. i find them very useful, but then again, i am not a piano player. it's primaraly meant for techno,trance, but i've used it for ambient mostly. it has an okay touch, but i wish the keyboard was springier. i do think the sounds can get old after a while. it's fairly programmable, but there is still only so much you can do.

it has been extremely reliable. never once had a problem, but i wish it didn't have a wallwart power supply. yeah, i would use it on a gig without a backup. i have.

never dealt with yamaha. i wouldn't know what to expect.

i mainly use it as a controller keyboard now, but for the price, it competes even with dedicated controller keyboards, plus you get the knobs! if it did get stolen, i would check my options first. i would look int getting a an1x. it has been a really good instrument.