I’ve been sampling my Casiotone 403 recently. I have recorded and sampled this instrument in the past, but this time I wanted to gather some of the beats at a slow tempo so that I could play them at many different tempos without hearing artifacts created when time expanding or compressing. This is a loop of the familiar Samba setting. I recorded it at 85 bpm, then cranked the tempo up to 195 bpm and looped it four times before rendering this example.

If you turn it up loud enough you’ll hear an unfortunate buzz. I attempted to get rid of the buzz using a noise gate, but I couldn’t get it to sound the way I wanted it to. I also thought about (and will probably do this eventually) sampling each sound at a very slow tempo and creating an instrument out of the individual samples. But for now I was interested in maintaining the charm of the original programs.

Casiotone Samba Setting