You may want study music, but no one wants to spend a thousand dollars on a keyboard only to find out that they hate it. Most people buy a beginner keyboard for typing “Hey Jude,” the kind of plastic model you might remember from middle school. They work well as tools for making sounds with your fingers, but the actual tone is still a bit to be desired.
That’s why I enjoyed my time with the Casio CT-S1000V. It’s a sleek $470 model that works as a great keyboard for beginners, but with one particularly cool trick: You can program lyrics into it and let the keyboard sing for you. You hear. It’s a rad tool for those of us with voices like angry crows.
Between its solid build, good sound, and easy-to-navigate interface, I think this board is the perfect place for a beginner. The vocal synthesizer is awesome enough that even die-hard synth enthusiasts will want to mess around when they come to check on your progress.
Classic Casio
Classic Casio models loved by indie style lovers like Mac Demarco for a reason. These basic, functional keyboards may sound nostalgic, but they still work well. Like many Casios before it, this one has a good keyboard and 800 built-in sounds, with everything from boring piano sounds to spatial synths. You also have 243 rhythms to play with, if you need a little inspiration.
You’ll be surprised how much the sound has come out since you last hit the wrong keyboard at Guitar Center before Covid. The team at Casio has included some legitimately great sounds that you could have paid thousands of dollars for before the iPhone era (listen to samples below).
You can plug the keyboard into the amp or use it as a MIDI keyboard with a computer, but I really like just using the built-in speakers at the top. It makes it easy to get into your music or quickly sample sounds without the hassle of turning on the amp or opening the Casio Music Space app (this works for iOS and Android and pairing with the keyboard).
The included LCD screen works well in dark rooms, and it gives you pretty granular control over everything you might want to tweak while playing. You can assign two buttons at the top left of the panel to perform various EQ filters, effects, and moves, and there’s a very useful pitch bend wheel on the far left, when you wanted to feel like Herbie Hancock in the 1970s.
Start connecting
Photo: Casio
You can get audio information from the keyboard in four ways: via the aforementioned speakers, the headphone jack, the stereo ¼-inch output, or via USB. You can also use the keyboard as a sampler for your favorite music, with the ability to capture audio from Bluetooth audio and use the internal six-track sequencer to arrange a beat.
Once plugged in, you can easily juggle and save whatever sounds you like for later use. Speaking of going around and looking for good sounds, I really fell in love with the new vocal synthesizer. It’s easy to import lyrics into the Casio Lyric Creator app (iOS, Android) and then transfer the entire song with the lyrics to the keyboard.
If you really hate singing, or you especially love Daft Punk or Peter Frampton, you’ll love it. You can use 22 different sounds and manipulate them with lots of effects and other sound parameters. The vocal system is polyphonic, which means you can play really great harmonies (listen below) through your own words.
