I'm gonna be honest here… I'm pretty stoked on this track! (and I have just aged myself). My Producer/Mix Engineer Byron really made this track come alive. And all the planets, moons and stars aligned to help me assemble a pretty insane and awesome music video. So without further ado… Here it is! And if you want to read more about it, read below…
So I guess the first question is… What is “The CZ?” Well, the answer is right there in the first few seconds of the video. The “CZ” in this case was a line of Synthesizers made in the 80's by Casio. You know Casio, known for cheap electronic calculator watches from the 80s, and those cool little mini keyboards that you can talk into and sample your voice on? We all either had one, or knew a friend who had one right? In this case that was the SK-1 (pictured).
But for a while there, Casio also decided to dip it's toes into the Professional Synthesizer market. And with that they released their CZ line of synthesizers.
Synth Nerd Alert (you can skip this paragraph if you don't care): At the time Yamaha was rocking the New Wave world with their DX-7 Synthesizer that used FM Synthesis (I won't even deep dive into what that is, IYKYK). I can guarantee that 90% of the hit songs you heard in the 80's were using this synth. The most popular sound being that iconic Electric Piano sound. So Casio decided it wanted to get in on that and released a more moderately priced version that used a different type of synthesis called Phase Distortion Synthesis. All these technologies gave synths their unique flavors of sound. This is why you will see synth players with different synthesizers. Each have their own characteristics.
My first “real” synth was a Casio CZ-5000 synthesizer (pictured) that I bought off of this guy I knew and played with occasionally at my church. It was pretty cool and had plenty of character. It was part of Casio's line of “professional” synthesizers.. The CZ-1, CZ-101, CZ-1000, CZ-3000, CZ-5000, etc. Cool for making spacey, blip bloop type sounds, and I remember it having a really nice Pad sound. But you could also pull off really cool resonant or sharp sounds from it. These ads I found for the Casio synths drip of 80's goodness!!
The CZ-5000 I owned was the flagship model. Why was that model special? It had a built in 8-track Sequencer. Basically the fundamental building block for creating electronic music. So I was able to create songs with multiple sounds playing at once on the synth. And that really helped me hone in my composing and synth programming skills. At the time though, I wasn't chasing the blip-blop sound. I was looking for more realistic sounding sounds. And unfortunately, the Casio fell short. So eventually I sold it to get a better synth with more realistic sounds. And that was the case when I started on synths. If I wanted something better, I needed to sell what I had.
From time to time there's been a resurgence of interest in these old Casio synths for their unique spacey, sci-fi sounds used in dance music. There was one in the 90s; I remember one of my old band mates picking up a CZ-101 (pictured) to make dance music with. And there was another a few years back. During that time they made a VST plugin for it, that I snatched up to see if it sounded like my old synth: The Virtual CZ. Sounds pretty close..
I picked up the above plugin, played around with it, and then it sat on my computer unused for a couple of years. But last year, I decided to crack it open, because I had read another article singing the praises of the old CZ line of synthesizers. And the banger you heard above was born. It had the temporary name of “Test the CZ,” but that just ended up being the name of the song. When the CZ synth pops up on my Music Video, the lead you hear is the Virtual CZ in action. Really cool resonant type of sound, just like my old synth.
The video was created pulling loads of different stock footage, layering stuff together and messing with layer filters. The cool little anime girl was generated with AI. And I just did a very simple animation by using the image with her mouth closed and then creating another with her mouth open. (Yes, she is supposed to be saying, “Get down!”). However, as I've said before, the videos are just a means to push the music, because the music is what it's all about.
Anyway, I had a lot of fun with this track, and it's already picking up a little bit of interest on YouTube. But I need to drive those numbers higher! So give it a listen and if you can, listen on some good headphones or speakers.
Hoping you dig it! And thanks for reading!
-Joda
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