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Filter All and XW surprises


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After 3.5 weeks away in the USA, I returned to the UK with a bump on Wednesday 16th. Thursday 17th, guess what was one of the first things I did? Yes, of course, fired up my XW's as I'd missed playing around with them whilst I was away from home!

 

And I was surprised again at just what the XW's can do. I've owned my P1 for over 18 months, and my G1 for about 7 months, and STILL I keep finding new things that I can do with them. As I've mentioned in previous posts, I'd struggled to get to grips with the filter for anything other than the monosynth. In the end, I almost wrote it off for anything other than use with the monosynth, and was campaigning for Casio to update the XW's with a genuine analogue filter(s). One of the main reasons for this is that when I tried using the filter with other XW sections (non monosynth) the results were far from pleasant. However, I think I now know why.

 

Firstly, when using the "filter all" function, one zone needs to set to a mono synth sound for the filter to work. The type of sound selected is important, as if it uses a really harsh/ screaming filter, it will affect the sound of any other section going through. I was looking for a nice, pleasant sounding sweep of a lush pad, so I chose a gentle mono synth sound in one zone, and a polysynth PCM sound in another. NOW I could get the sweeping, lush, poly sound that I was after - tweaking the cut off and resonance knobs now sounding great! You lose some of the stereo effect of the sound (I think it resorts to mono), but hey, a Jupiter 8 was mono too (other than the chorus effect I think), so if it's good enough for the Jupiter 8...

 

Then I found further tricks you can do. With one zone set to a monosynth bass and the other zone set to the polysynth sound, I enabled the arpegiator  for the bass and had a cool little bass riff running. I stuck in a simple drum pattern in the step sequencer, hit the 'hold' button and let the pattern loop whilst tweaking the cut off and resonance. Now I was getting some great sounds and that classic sweep. And then I was finding that as I lowered the cut off, I was getting a lovely 'choppy' rhythmic effect on the polysynth sound, in sync with the bass and drums.

 

But there's more (!) By adjusting the DSP settings, it's possible to select which sections go through the filter. My first attempt had the filter sweeping EVERYTHING, drums, bass and polysynth. But by adjust various DSP settings to '+/-' (instead of 'On'), I was able to get the filter to only affect the bass and polysynth sound whilst leaving the step sequencer drums unaffected. My experimentation has been a bit hit of miss at the moment as I'm not 100% clear on what exactly I am doing, however, the findings are opening up yet more possibilities and capabilities of the XW's. More importantly, it is sounding GREAT!

 

Last night's experiments were done on my G1, and I'm sure the same could be achieved on the P1 too. I also realised why I was struggling with my first attempts at using the 'filter all' function on my P1. The limitations are that (I believe this to be correct), you cannot 'filter all' the  Hex Layers or Drawbar Organ sections. You need to have a monosynth sound selected, and you can only have one of the Monosynth, Hex or Drawbar sounds at anyone time, even with multiple zones. That does mean that all the PCM and samples can be routed through the filter, so there are still many opportunities for new sounds and effects to be created/ filtered!

 

Luckily for me that I have both a P1 and a G1, so I can leave the P1 to give me the excellent Hex Layer sounds, and do all my filter tweaking with PCM/ Sample sounds on the G1. I guess as well you could take the sounds from the P1 and route it through the G1's filter if you really wanted to. For now though, I feel I've discovered yet another dimension to the XW's. Perhaps others will tell me that they knew of these filter effects all along and I've just been a bit dense in working my XW's (ahem!) For now though, I'm having great sonic fun, and that's what the XW's are all about! :D   

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  • 1 year later...

I just wanted to sort of pop this to the top and cite it as an example of how helpful even these older posts are. Between this particular post, other posts from Chas, Brad and others, and especially Alen's research, posts and fantastic, invaluable XW-P1 Companion document, I've been able to push the P1 into some places I wasn't able to a year ago. This forum and its Search feature is such a big help as well, and I thank Casio and Mike for making it available. For those who don't know, a forum like this seems to be a frustratingly rare thing for a lot of other brands.

I've had a lot of exciting gear rise to the surface of my setup over the past year (Boutiques, minilogue, Circuit, a CZ-1), but the XW-P1 remains the only one that has not been swapped around, and literally stays at the top of my setup. Thanks so much, all of you! I'm hoping a little experiment I'm working on comes out to be something cool and useful, and I'll be sure to "pay it forward".

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