Wow! The Casio XW-P1 is only $499.00 at Sweetwater ;-)

At that price they're going to sell a lot of these things.

Sweet deal for sure.

Having had pretty well the entire CZ series at one time or another (the last one was a CZ-1), I'm looking forward to trying out Casio's next foray into the synth market.

Ian

cool. My rig in the 80's was a Casio cz101 MIDI'd to a Sequential Prophet 600, with a Rhodes key bass. How times change

Great News.....Kool Synth....Awesome Price !

Great demo.....you can get very creative with this new Casio Synth....they will sell a ton of these !!

Geez.., I'm sitting here set to buy the MicroArranger this weekend, but this new Casio is really making me reconsider. Glad one of my keyboards is an arranger though.

$499 is one hell of a price for something like this. Casio really found a good spot for themselves in the VA synth market because when you compare features to the price, this Casio looks to be a winner.

That keyboard interest me... Love it without hearing it

Dan I'm telling ya..prices are coming down & quality sound is going up....let us know your experiences when you get it or we'll go for "CRABS" again and brainstorm !!

Casio WX-P1 Up Close

XW-P1 sequencer

I saw this demoed at NAMM and was very impressed for the $499 street price. I think Casio will do well with this. They had none available to actually play so I didn't get to feel the unweighted key action. The VA synth engine is monophonic and can be used to process external audio sources. I just wish it had some polyphony, the Casio CZ series at least had 4 note polyphony ... oh well. The PCM wave engine ( Hex mode ) is polyphonic. They didn't demo the XW-G1 which is aimed more at the DJ community which has the same solo synth engine but trades the PCM engine for a sampler and sample looping. It has flash memory for the samples.

Very Cool Nigel....thanx for the demo link.
It has a very hip look also...love the colors. I think this CASIO xw-p1 is gonna give some of the competition a good run for their money. Hope to see more.

Nigel, I wouldn't be one bit surprised if those are the same keys from their current arranger line. These synths appear to share some hardware in other areas from their arrangers as well.

Nick over at Sonic-State flat out asked the rep if these new models are sharing Casio arranger technology and the rep confirmed it. To me that's a serious WIN WIN right there. That truly makes these new Casio's hybrids. They've merged a VA synth with a bread and butter performance synth, added a step sequencing groove box, AND are utilizing chord recognition from their arrangers. That's a lot of synth for only $499!

I wish I had got a chance to chat with Nick at NAMM. We usually get together and have a few drinks and talk but this year he was busy doing a video interview after the show closed for the night and I had to leave.

Here is the SonicState interview Nick ended up doing on the XW-P1 and pretty much shows its various features.

I like what I hear. Great synth from Casio. I am glad they are back.

Great sound great price what more could you ask for?

Yes I agree this will be a winner for Casio.

I hope they also get back into the TOTL arranger game too..