ilewis33

Yes, my CTK-7200 does exactly the same thing, and elsewhere in these forums (http://www.casiomusicforums.com/index.php?/topic/12938-keys-getting-very-noisy/), you'll find similar issues. You pinpointed the issue, though - in order to offer these keyboards at this price, sacrifices have to be made somewhere. Amusingly, I have a 32 year old Casio CZ-5000 with a rock solid keyboard.

Just a brief melody using the preset patches and built-in sequencer of the CZ-5000, the easiest to grasp step sequencer I've ever played with.

Guitar Center in the US has 'em for $99. I got one last week, in-store. They had 4 brand new in boxes up on a high shelf, none of them on display. Loving it! I certainly wouldn't have paid $299 for it, but at $99, it's great fun. I see why they languished - I challenged my kids to figure out how to change the sounds the pads made and record a new pattern... no dice! Compare that to something like the Roland JD-Xi, where anyone can walk right up to it and start making noise. BUT... wow, what a lot of great stuff inside once you completely read and understand the tutorial guide. So many sounds, I really appreciate the huge variety of drum samples. I have my CTK-7200 running through it, and I will typically: Create a drum pattern of 4 measures or so. Create bass line using the solo synth bank. Record pad and melody voices from my CTK-7200 as samples (I wish they had split the memory a little differently and maybe had 8 9 second samples available, but I understand it's primarily a drum box. Still, 3 seconds is plenty long enough for a lot of melody work, you just have to chain them together. Either perform "live" into my Windows machine, or record the tracks/samples individually into Podium (free DAW) and put them together there. Can't seem to get the Assignable fader to do anything to the effects - I have it set to EFT, but I have yet to hear any difference in an effect when I manipulate it. I also can't for the life of me get any kind of useful effect knob recording happening. I gave up on that and now just use the effects "live" as I record into Podium on my Windows machine. I feel that if they had made it a rectangle, given it an LCD screen (even 2 lines!) and used a more traditional scroll wheel/enter interface for setting things up, they would have been selling these for $399 all day long. But.. I guess it wouldn't be a Casio then.