NEW DELHI: Casio India, the wholly-owned subsidiary of the $5.6 billion consumer electronics major Casio Computer Co Japan, has unveiled new, high-end keyboards at affordable rates.
The company on Wednesday said it had added four new models – CTK 6000, 7000 and WK 7500 and 6500 – to its line up of GenNext Keyboards series. The new keyboards have more keys pre-fed with local instruments' sounds and advanced creation and editing features at rates that Casio claimed are way below the price tags sported by similar machines from its immediate competitor.
Yamaha of Japan is the other large and respected keyboard manufacturer which enjoys a good market share in the Indian market, but its keyboards are more popular among the professional music-makers. With this launch, Casio is hoping it can challenge Yamaha's dominance in the high-end keyboards.
"Casio is always introducing products with features which contributed in the field of developing and popularizing music amongst masses. These new keyboards are music studios in themselves," said Casio India sales and marketing head K Seth.
"With this single instrument, you can create as well as can deliver impressive performance at any platform with or without other instruments, this will definitely create interest in music in GenNext with its professional features. That is why, we have named these as GenNext Pro series of keyboards," he added.
GenNext Pro series supports all sort of music playability, including performing with band, performing solo and music creation including composing with sequencer and easy composing, even for non-keyboardist.
The keyboards features include song sequencer offering 16 tracks plus one system track. On the system track, both the keyboard performance and the auto accompaniment are simultaneously recorded. Its audio recording / playback function enable sounds from an external microphone or other instrument to be recorded for playback, then simultaneously mixed with keyboard performances and the song sequencer for recording.
The new range is equipped with up to 800 diverse tones and upto 250 rhythms built-in. Included in the tones are upto 50 Drawbar Organ tones that can be adjusted using nine sliders that function as drawbars corresponding to certain ranges of overtones.
Apart from this there are various other professional features like 32-channel mixer with this each channel can be independently adjusted for volume level, pan position, reverb send, and other parameters, and sounds from the external inputs can be included in the mix. With Tone Editor Up to 100 original tones can be created and stored in memory by changing any of the 800 built-in tones using parameters such as attack and release time, filter cutoff, vibrato, reverb, chorus, and DSP. Moreover it's 32-channel Mixer channel can be independently adjusted for volume level, pan position, reverb send, and other parameters, and sounds from the external inputs can be included in the mix.
CTK 6000, 7000 and WK 7500, 6500 will be immediately available at all leading music outlets. GenNext pro series price rage start from Rs 16,995 going up to Rs 33,995.