Casio CT-X5000

The casio CT-X5000 is a a good keyboard with beautiful sound quality and many features. At the first glance it seems very complex to use, but it comes with a very good user manual and is very detailed and extensive . In order to use the keyboard it is important to read the manual from the start to the end, trying out the functionality as you go through it.

The sound is fantastic especially with the the after touch. This feature is very good when it comes to wind, brass, strings, pipe, organ, piano, pad, synth and pad tones. The sequencer has excellent features to create your own user patterns, arpeggios, rhythms and song content. It can create 100 user patterns for each of these. Then you can put them all together in the midi sequencer and create a long songwith 40,000 midi events. There is place for 10 user songs each having 40,000 events. After creating the songs, they can be transferred to the USB flash drive as a standard midi file either as mode 1 or 2. Later they can be played back with the USB midi song function. Wave files can also be played with the USB function.

MIDI :-

This is where the keyboard falls short and is a great disappointment.
The main disappointment is the non existing syncing options of midi clock data. So if you want to sync other midi devices or daw and midi software there is no way to sync them together. I was very unimpressed with this! Almost thought that I had made a mistake buying the keyboard since the excellent sequencer was useless with all my other equipment.

I have a Korg KP3+ Kossalator which solved the problem with midi clocks! If I feed the audio output of the casio into the KP3+ it has a function that detects the BMP of the audio and creates midi clocks which adapts the clocks as the casio plays. The midi clocks are then fed into the midi out and if you merge the MIDI OUT OF THE KP3+ AND THE MIDI OUTPUT OF THE CASIO, you get a very exact synchronisation to other midi devices. If you quantize the midi using other devices or software the result is exactly on the beat. Hopefully this can be rectified with a system update. Casio should look into this to make this keyboard epic.

The DSP is excellent with really good quality and lots of good effects.