What better way to make up for a frustratingly busy bank holiday weekend spring cleaning the house than to make a few synth pads?
I've developed a bit of a soft spot for the Yamaha Cs2x since i bought it, but at the same time it has some stupid flaws. The complete lack of a filter envelope intensity control anywhere on the panel is a pretty big flaw, though there is a work around by making assign knob 1 'FEGVelSens' combined with velocity offset which uses the velocity to control the filter EG amount. Also all the sounds are made up of preset AWM2 layers and your edits alter the setting above or below the preset values. But it doesn't show the preset values on screen so there is a lot of trial and error involved. They're sample based and are really unhelpfully named, so finding a saw waveform for example can take some digging. Some preset layers also have some hidden parameters which can make them impossible to edit into anything useful, particularly when there are hidden envelope parameters!
On the plus side it has a pretty nice sounding analogue filter emulation, 4 independent layers and 64 voices of polyphony. With a bit of digging (quite a lot actually, and a few notes to remember where the good stuff is) its possible to find some nice bright waveforms to work with. There is also a midi editor called Cs2x \"tune 'em up\" which will run on a windows PC or in wine on Linux. The effects aren't to be sniffed at either with a reverb slot, a chorus slot and a vari slot which has a long list of choices with parameters to edit too. All the audio in this video is the Cs2x only with no external effects.
It has plenty of keyboard sounds like electric pianos and organs that are very usable, though the acoustic pianos don't feel right to me. I paid £90 for it so i reckon there a bit of a budget bargin, but only if you can be bothered to really get to know it.
