UVI Releases Officially Licensed Vintage Casio Legacy With 110,000 Samples

Over 110,000 samples, six classic instruments, and a direct collaboration with CASIO Computer Co., Ltd.: French developer UVI released Vintage CASIO Legacy on April 9 as the centerpiece of Vintage Vault 5, covering machines that helped redefine what budget synthesis could do in the early 1980s.

The six instruments UVI rebuilt are the CZ, FZ, VZ, HZ, CTK, and RZ. That is Phase Distortion from the flagship CZ-1, 16-bit sampling via the FZ, Interactive Phase Distortion in the VZ, Spectrum Dynamic synthesis through the HZ-600, the Integrated Cross-Sound Architecture of the rare CTK-1000, and the RZ sampling drum machine. UVI describes the collection as "a piece of Japanese history," and the framing holds: Casio's Phase Distortion and Interactive Phase Distortion architectures were original inventions, not licensed approximations of someone else's technology. These weren't also-ran synths; they were engineering bets that paid off sonically and landed in hands that couldn't afford a DX7.

This isn't UVI's first Casio territory. The company's earlier Cameo library touched some of the same ground, but Vintage CASIO Legacy operates at a different depth. UVI had access to original hardware and recorded across multiple sessions to capture tonal variations, voicing nuance, and signal path character rather than just the fundamental pitch. The 110,000 samples underpin 1,400-plus creative presets, and the approach is strict source sampling throughout. That distinction matters for Casio specifically: the mechanical idiosyncrasies and lo-bit digital grit in these instruments are the point, and circuit modeling tends to average them out.

All six instruments connect through a dedicated Multi Groove engine that fuses the suite into a single performance environment. The Multis section organizes patch combinations by style, dark wave, slow-fi, and similar contexts, so layering a CTK pad against an RZ pattern is a preset selection rather than a routing exercise. The whole package runs inside UVI Falcon or the free UVI Workstation, integrating cleanly into any modern DAW.

Vintage Vault 5 now covers 43 instruments across five decades of synthesis history. The Casio release is the most substantial new addition in early digital territory, a category that defined the texture of 1980s electronic music and has been thinly served by officially licensed software until now.

Introductory pricing runs $199 through April 27.