Released in 1987, the Casio FZ-1 was one of the first affordable digital samplers on the market. The FZ-1 had features such as waveform drawing and 16-bit sampling that were previously only available on more expensive equipment. The FZ shipped with 1 Meg of sampling memory (expandable to 2 Megs) and booted from ROM rather than an OS diskette. It also had a built-in synthesizer section including sawtooth, square, pulse, double sine, saw/pulse and random wave forms.

The FZ-1's keyboard was velocity sensitive and had aftertouch. It also included eight outputs which gave it the ability to perform the as a multitimbral expander with 8 independent monophonic voices played together via MIDI. One of it's best features was the resonant low-pass filter. It gave programmers the ability to create a much wider variety of sounds in a way not possible on any Akai (Casio's main competitor at the time) machine until the S3000.

Original Casio FZ Ad - Only 298,000 Yen!

Casio also produced two rackmount expander versions of the FZ. These were the FZ-10M and FZ-20M. The racks included a number of improvements over the keyboard version: double the memory (2MB) as standard (allowing a maximum sampling time of 29 seconds at 36KHz); significantly improved playback sound quality, through the use of a different DAC (Digital-to-analog converter); improved user interface, through a brighter display and the noticeably faster internal response to the use of buttons and sliders, plus a number of bug fixes.

Our FZ-1 sample collection features a wide variety of sounds that you can use in your tracks. Everything from the classic TR808 and TR909 kits for hip hop and dance tracks to a wide assortment of analog and digital synth sounds and acoustic instruments. We also offer a great 88 key steinway piano and an assortment of sound effects. All well sampled and programmed. Just load and play!