This video, via Altenberg, captures a live performance of Bach‘s Prelude and Fugue No. 1 In C Major, popularized as the accompaniment of Gounod’s Ave Maria, on Casio CZ-5000.
The CZ-5000, along with the CZ-1, was one of Casio’s professional CZ keyboards in the 80’s, offering a full-size take on the CZ-101 synth engine. Like Yamaha’s contemporary DX line, the CZ keyboards successfully demonstrated the expressive potential of digital synthesis. But while Yamaha’s DX synths were much more influential in the market, Casio’s CZ line offers a much more tactile and immediate interface.
The CZ series is great for learning and playing preludes and fugues. Actually, any synth can add some spacey flavour to baroque era masterpieces. However, some of them tend to sound muddy with some analogue synths. Or better play them like you were using a church organ. This digital synth has a very pleasant and soft sound giving a dreamy quality to JS Bach. Looking forward for hearing more !
Casio CZ does a lot more than standar user think. Certainly need some tricky programming and for me taste bypass internal chorus in CZ-5000 (are noisy and a lot airy) but with a nice EFX processor can do a lot of epic sounds.
Example sound is not very interesting, so the music, but CZ if you know how to use his tricks can be a phenomenal techno/pop, electro or synthpop Synth bastard because his sound, despite being digital, has a fairly analog quality imposible to emulate on other synths. Their sounds are unique.
Lovely!
Beautifully done! I had a CZ-101 for years and you can even get beefy Oberheim-ism from it if you dig in. It got even bigger when run through a couple of Boss pedals. A synth generally isn’t complete without at least some FX. Even a real B-3 speaks up more with a light dusting.
Did the fugue get left out intentionally?
There’s a missing measure there! But it sounds very sweet.