CasioCTK

Keyboard buyers are mostly players only, partly musicians who create songs and very small part of musicians who create sounds and rhythms for their keyboard. Silvano with his knowledges and experience belongs to this last very small group. Other buyers can in this respect rely on keyboard manufacturers and tones/rhythms creators only. Choice and offer of tones and rhythms for a keyboard depends (probably) on market share. And in this regard Casio loses points. In wide area around no band uses Casio keyboard. Professionals here use Yamaha/Korg only. After buying Yamaha SX700 I understood why it is so. I like acoustic instruments and these voices are superb here (sorry Silvano, you cannot do more than MZ-X engine allows). There is also wide choice of free and payed voices and styles (rhythms). In short time I downloaded over 2000 very good styles just from range of my interest - jazz, swing, ballroom, rumba, beguine and samba. There are many free and payed packs from Yamaha, too. Try to compare it with what is offered for Casio. So, there are also other views here than how somebody can tweak his keyboard. Many others cannot do the same.

Thank you Brad for inspiration, I try to use some midi recorder in computer for recording pad phrases.

Brad understood my question correctly. I want to record existing pad phrase into MIDI file.

I would like to record some pads (percussion loops only) as MIDI, but no pad sound is recorded, regardless if accompaniment is playing or not. Changing port A10 to A09 or A11 has changed the instrument played. Which settings are needed to get pads into .mid file?

Thank you Jokeyman123 and Silvano Silva for your good hints.. Especially that Silvano's last post, which pointed me to the fact, that I need ready made keyboard with out of box good rhythms and tones of acoustic instruments and a big choice of other available rhythms and tones, was very helpful to me. Finally a couple of days ago arrived my new Yamaha PSR-SX700.

This answer I got today from pcpanik-Musik on his YouTube channel: „The AKX-10 has better natural instruments then the MZ-X series from Casio. And a better keyboard 🎹. But missing the great style editing functionality from Casios MZ-X. To be honest: both, Casio MZ-X500 and AKX10 have some big flaws in their software, which make both not a great choice if you are planing to create your own styles for specific songs. But Medeli will maybe fix some of those issues, while Casio stopped developing anything for the MZ-X series years ago. In my opinion the MZ-X500 was a great idea to build a companion keyboard, workstation and multilayer Synthesizer with a 16-key midi controller in one product, but the implementation was poor and the natural Instruments sound even worse.“

Thank you Jokeyman123, there is no store in my country where I could try and listen to that AKX10. Therefore I had some kind of hope that maybe somebody from this forum had such possibility to try this keyboard personally, not just listen it on YouTube only. That's why I asked here. But every answer and advice is appreciated.

For me, visibility of Medeli's backlighted buttons is much better than Casio's black buttons on black panel. Also 7“ touchscreen could be a plus. Four Quick settings for every rhythm/style (Registration memory), 3 buttons for easy switching or layering tones during playing on keyboard and 3 assignable switches seems to me very attractive. Therefore I am asking about quality of tones and rhythms. Some reviewers wrote that AKX10 tones are nearly as good as some 2000$ keyboards, other that its tones are nearly unusable. So you can choose whom to believe. I need just comparison between AKX10 and MZX. As for rhythms, on planetkeyboard.com there are 8 rhythm packs for Casio MZX and 29 rhythm packs for this Medeli. It looks like Medeli is much more supported by other vendors even now than Casio MZX ever was. And what will happen with Casio or Medeli companies or keyboards in next 5 years? I don't ask. I am 75...

It looks like Medeli AK-X10 could be good substitution or even upgrade for Casio MZ-X 300/500 owners. Can anybody compare quality of tones and rhythms in these keyboards?

Synchronizing start of playing pad with accompaniment is described in manual. But how to synchronize stop playing pad with accompaniment? I would like to stop playing pad (loop) and accompaniment when pressing button Stop Accompaniment. Is it possible or is there some workaround?

Hello Alex16, Event is any instrument or drums/percussion note/sound in rhythm accompaniment. By event editing you can add and delete any note/sound or change its instrument, pitch, volume, duration and placing in the bar. Hopefully it helps a little.

Thank you, Silvano. Great advice. It helped. At the beginning I was afraid that my keyboard may be bricked if data transfer from USB stick or their processing was incorrect, but everything went without any problem. After reinstalling firmware I did factory reset to clean up memory - hopefully it is better than fulfilling memory and defragmenting it. Now everything works again and I don't need to send my keyboard to repair center. I am happy again. Thank you very much.

Yes, it was also my first thought. Therefore I used 3 different USB flash drives with the same result.

Today I tried to load some 10 tones from USB drive into my MZ-X300. Loading the last of them seemed to be extremely long, although the file was small - keyboard was frozen. After switching off and on again, no one of new and many of previously loaded and used tones could be played. Names of them are displaywed, but there is no sound. When I saved them to USB drive, those files are small and all of them end with text „UserSplit“ and some numbers (displayed in Windows Notepad). They are corrupt. When trying to load tones, sometimes there is message Wrong Data and sometimes everything looks OK. But after displaying Complete, there is no name of tone displayed (only UserXXX) and no sound. When trying to load rhythms, everything looks OK. But after displaying Complete, there is displayed name of rhythm, but no rhythm can be played and it is not possible to delete it, because Execute button is dimmed. I did some testing according advice some years ago here in this forum. These are my results: DDR RAM CHECK DDR2 Auto Nch:06 Pch:06 FLASH CHECK SumChk:OK USB ChECK USB:NG USB HOST CHECK nothing displayed RAM CHECK RAM:OK Can anybody tell me what happened and what to do with my keyboard? Many thanks in advance.

Hi Creydeaux, according to CTK-4400 user manual you can edit only built-in rhythms (rhythm number, part on/off, tone number, volume level, left/right speaker balance, reverb depth, chorus depth) and save them as user rhythms - page 45. I couldn't find anything about importing other rhythms.