I am knocked out by this learning tool, the sounds it omits are close to the real instruments, a musician friend of mine tried the keyboard and was pleasantly surprised I can only marvel at the difference between the keyboard of 20 years ago and this - no comparison.
The microphone jack is of course on the keyboard.
Your lessons can be shown on a TV screen via a provided Video out lead and should this be your thing then reading karaoke lyrics from the TV screen for you to sing along to.
So this enables pieces to be written on a PC and then transferred to the Casio format and then downloaded to the keyboard. You can input your own pieces via SD card and there is a CD provided that allows a USB port to become a midi port something that is often called a joystick port and not always found on recent PC's. There is also a piano bank of 50 tunes for the main part these are classical pieces but playing them in a strange instrument is great fun and even at the really basic stage the keyboard will play them for you.Īs far a learning it features a three step learning program and this can be configured to rate your progress as a teacher would do. You are provided with a Song Book as you progress this comes in useful but for starters there are 50 songs in the song bank and should you be into karaoke then connect a microphone and sing alone. Once you start to master some tunes (either one or both hands) then you are going to want some rhythm accompaniment there are 120 different offerings from Ballad, Dance, Rock, Jazz, European, Latin and more. At this point we are up to 220 but sections still to come are Pipe, Synth-Lead, Synth-Pad, Ethnic and then a huge section of Tones and finishing with more than a dozen drum sets so this unit will certainly have instruments for you. Then around 25 different brass instruments and nearly as many reed offerings. Now moving on to strings such as violin and cello and from there to around 25 different orchestral sounds. Nearly 20 different guitars and about the same number of acoustic and electronic basses. 15 different pianos and that's before you move onto a whole raft of electric pianos, close to 40 different organs and around 15 different percussion instruments such as vibraphone and glockenspiel. This is not just a piano keyboard there are in fact 513 instruments inside the unit. I am well aware that this is not the way a 'real musician' should learn however anyone wanting to play for fun can soon grasp the basics. The keys you should press light up to show you which to press. Between the speakers are a whole host of buttons, sliders and even a clever LCD display.Ĭertainly unless you are already a musician you are unlikely to get far without the 74 page manual, I have had days of fun starting to grasp the basics - not by playing scales - by playing along to tunes. Should this be too loud for others then there is a earphone socket. Behind the keyboard are a pair of reasonable speakers - one at each end - with plenty of output for a normal room, in fact when practising I had the volume down almost to nil. It is 95cm long, 34cm deep and 3cm tall at the front increasing to 13cm at the back. It is a five octave keyboard but what lies behind the keyboard is the guts of the unit. This top of the range offering is a world away from that. Around twenty years ago I got an old Casio keyboard and that is exactly what it was a keyboard and little else.