In this video, Marc Doty takes a deep look at the classic Yamaha CS-50 synthesizer.
Released in 1976, the four-voice Yamaha CS-50 offers CS-family sounds, but not the power, price or pounds of its bigger siblings, the CS-60 & CS-80.
This is part 1 of a planned series of videos on the Yamaha CS-50. This video focuses on the oscillator section of the CS-50.
If you’ve used the Yamaha CS-50, let us know what you think of it!
Got one. Still love it and won’t ever sell it!
The only thing I really do miss is the ribbon controller like on its bigger brothers.
Damn that thing is squeaky clean.
I had one back in the day and loved it. Unfortunately one of the oscillators went massively out of tune, and no one in my small town knew how to fix it, so I ended up trading it in on something. It was a very sad day.
I used to often run mine through a boss chorus pedal as well to thicken it up.
The CS-80 and Prophet T-8 keyboards are still the best I’ve ever played. For all of the recent nattering, I have yet to see a controller keyboard you can meld with like I could do with each of those. You also don’t see many synths capable of handling poly-pressure in any form. It would not bother me one bit to see a swing away from so much step-sequencing and back towards real keyboards you can dig into on three or four programmable axes. That’s what the CS-80 basically did. That engaging action has as much to do with the legend as the big detuned sawooth pads.