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Cazio, a free VST plugin emulates the Casio MT-100 “toy keyboard” from the ‘80s

The name Retro Cazio points that SampleScience’s new free plugin emulates an old-school Casio keyboard MT-100, a 1983 model that generated its sounds using the NEC D931 chip. These sounds are not high-end, but they certainly have a ‘vibe’

This was very much an entry-level home keyboard, which explains the 20 toy-like sounds that Retro Cazio includes. There’s also a single drum kit, along with a multi-LFO, high-pass/low-pass filter, reverb, glide, an ADSR envelope and a choice of three voice modes: polyphonic, legato and mono.

Features:

• 20 retro toy keyboard sounds
• 1 drum kit
• Multi-LFO
• Highpass/lowpass filter
• Reverb
• Glide
• Amplitude range controls
• 3 voice modes: polyphonic, legato, and mono

Retro Cazio runs as a VST/AU plugin on Mac and Windows and can be downloaded for free from the SampleScience website.

IK Multimedia has launched UNO Sounds, a massive free sound library for the UNO Synth Pro, UNO Synth and UNO Drum.

For the synths, you will find sound collections from artists, DJs and designers, and for UNO Drum, more vintage kits.

All UNO Sounds are free to registered users and can be downloaded from the IK Product Manager.

See the IK Multimedia website for details.

Tahti.studio was released in December and has already been updated with new features, such as a note parameter that can be quantised to a freely configurable scale with support for microtonality and Scala tuning files.

The online music-making tool that is more powerful than you might think got updated

Tahti.studio has now received an update, with the most exciting addition being an open-source library of free-licensed drum samples that features, among others, 808, 909, and household percussion kits from Bedroom Producers Blog.

These sounds and patterns can be downloaded and used in other projects or instruments, and generous producers can even submit their own sample packs to the default library via GitHub. The impressive browser-based groovebox has also received some tweaks and improvements to its workflow, and users can now import, and export individual patterns as .wav or .tahti files.

There have been plenty of fun browser-based online music-making tools down the years, but the Tahti.studio groovebox looks significantly more capable than most of them.

Inspired by Elektron’s hardware grooveboxes, this offers sample-based sound generation – you can import your own samples, and a library of sounds and patterns comes included – with support for single-cycle waveforms. You have eight tracks to work with, and plenty of flexibility.

Example, each track has its own multimode filter, distortion, frequency shifter, sample-rate reducer, and amp envelope. Almost all parameters can be modulated on a per-step basis, and there are three freely assignable modulation sources per track. Each step can have its own micro-timing, retriggering, probability, and trigger conditions, while tracks can have individual lengths and sequencer speeds. There are four send effects (chorus, phaser, reverb, delay) and a master compressor and soft clipper.

Collaboration is possible as well, thanks to the option to share patterns via secret links, and you can render patterns to WAV files so that you can continue to work on them in your DAW.

Get your groove on over at the Tahti.studio website.