Casio Ct S1 article
Casio CT-S1: A Complete Buyer’s Guide
Most portable keyboards shout about how much they do. The CT-S1 sits there doing almost none of it, on purpose — and whether that suits you is the whole decision.
Walk into a shop looking at portable keyboards and you will meet a wall of instruments shouting about how much they do. Six hundred sounds. Two hundred rhythms. Arpeggiators, harmonisers, a screen full of menus. Then there is the Casio CT-S1, sitting there in black or white or a rather lovely red, doing almost none of it on purpose.
That is the whole story of this keyboard, and whether it is the right one for you comes down to how you feel about the things it leaves out.
What the Casio CT-S1 actually is
It is a 61-key portable keyboard built around the idea that you sit down and play. Casio give it full-size, touch-sensitive keys and their AiX sound source, with 61 tones on board — a stereo grand piano plus sixty others covering electric pianos, organs, strings, woodwind and a handful of Casio Classic Tones borrowed from the old machines. Polyphony is a stated 64 notes.
Sound comes out of horizontal bass-reflex speakers with what Casio call Volume-Sync EQ, which adjusts the balance as you turn it down so quiet playing does not go thin and trebly. It weighs 4.49 kg, runs from the mains or from batteries, and has a class-compliant USB-MIDI port that needs no driver.
The thing you must know before you buy
The Casio CT-S1 has no rhythms and no auto-accompaniment. None. No backing patterns you trigger with a chord in your left hand, no arpeggiator, no auto-harmoniser, and no pitch-bend wheel. There is barely a display.
This is not an omission, it is the design. Casio's other Casiotone models are arranger keyboards and make no secret of it — the CT-S400, for instance, carries 600 tones, 200 accompaniment rhythms, an arpeggiator and a pitch wheel. The CT-S1 deliberately strips all of that away and leaves you with sounds and keys.
If backing rhythms are how you enjoy playing, you will find this keyboard frustrating within an hour, and no amount of praise for its piano sound will fix that. Go and look at the CT-S400 instead. Nobody will think less of you.
Who it suits
- Anyone learning piano properly. Touch-sensitive full-size keys and a good grand piano tone, with nothing on the panel to distract from practising.
- Players who already own the clever gear. If the arranging happens in software, a keyboard that simply plays well and speaks USB-MIDI is exactly the right shape.
- People short of space. Under four and a half kilos, battery-capable, and handsome enough to leave out rather than hide in a cupboard — which matters more for practice habits than any specification.
- Anyone who wants to play, not programme. The stripped panel is the point.
Who should look elsewhere
- Singers wanting a one-person band. No accompaniment means no backing.
- Synth players. No pitch wheel, no modulation wheel, no deep editing.
- Anyone who needs weighted keys. These are touch-sensitive, not hammer-action. For graded-hammer feel you are looking at a digital piano, not a portable keyboard.
The sounds, and why sixty-one is enough
Sixty-one tones sounds miserly next to a rival boasting six hundred, right up until you look at what the six hundred contain. Most large tone lists are padded with variations nobody plays twice. A short list is a list somebody edited.
The stereo grand piano is the one the instrument is built around, and it is the sound you will spend your hours with. Around it sit electric pianos, organs, strings, brass and woodwind, and a set of Casio Classic Tones that nod back to the instruments the name comes from. You can layer two together from the front panel, and there are reverb, chorus and delay effects to sit them in a space.
What you will not find is deep editing. Filters, envelopes, modulation routing — none of it. Again: a playing instrument, not a programming one.
Getting it talking to other things
The USB-MIDI port is class-compliant, which is a dull phrase that saves an enormous amount of trouble: plug it into a computer or tablet and it appears, with no driver to hunt down. That makes it a perfectly good controller for whatever software you already use, and it means the keyboard has a second life even if your playing moves on.
Casio also offer a free app, Music Space, which handles playback and a few learning functions from a phone or tablet. Headphones go in the front, which is the setting most flats require after nine in the evening.
Things worth checking in the shop
Specifications only tell you so much, and a keyboard is a physical object you are going to touch every day.
- Play the keys quietly. Touch response is the whole argument for this instrument over a cheaper one. Make sure the quiet end responds the way you want.
- Listen at low volume. That Volume-Sync EQ claim is easy to test by simply turning it down, which is how most people will actually play it at home.
- Pick up the box. If it is going to travel, 4.49 kg with batteries in is different from 4.49 kg on a stand in a spare room.
- Check what comes with it. Stands, pedals and cases are usually extra, and the accessory bundle often costs more than the discount you negotiated.
The Casio CT-S1 in one line
It is a keyboard for playing rather than for features, and it is honest about that in a market where almost nothing else is. If the list of things it does not do reads like a relief, this is probably your instrument. If it reads like a list of things missing, the Casio CT-S1 is not the keyboard for you, and that is useful to know before the box is open rather than after.
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