Synthstuff Kawai K1 II
Behold: The Kawai K1 II is a digital synthesizer from the late 80s build by the
Kawai Musical Instruments Manufacturing Company in Hamamatsu Japan. Its a
cheap and easy to find machine cause its sneered upon by analog snoots who
probably don’t have any braincell left to program it cause they inhaled too much
toxic soldering fumes. A Really cool thing about the K1 is that it sort of looks like
Darth Vader with its sleek triangular edges. Apart from that it also has a supercool
joystick to program the sounds and smoothly mix through the different waveforms while playing
Inside this beast:
There are 4 oscillators with 256 digital waveforms in glorious 8 bit(!) resolution. All you
can do is change the pitch and shape the envelopes for each of these 4 oscs.
There is some other stuff like effects and an LFO but there are no filters of any kind
so you might want to put an external lowpass filter on the outputs or do some freaky
stuff with your mixer EQ. This thing is a forgotten techno cult classic used in a lot
legendary classics back in the days (LFO’s – LFO deep evolving stringpad is a preset from
this machine for example)
The K1 has a weird gritty evaporating 8 bit warmth…ideal for decomposing dusty dubtechno ambient and almost william basinksi-esque disintegration loop vibes
Here are some mp3 snipps out of the K1mkII:
Kawai techno (Drums are not from the K1)
Dubby evapo techno (Drums are not from the K1)
Vector Synthesis techno (Drums are not from the K1)