The Casio FZ-1, released in 1987, was a 16-bit sampler with eight voices, three sample rates, and a 3.5" floppy drive. The FZ-10M rack came with 2MB of sample memory as standard, double what the FZ-1 keyboard shipped with.

You can hear an FZ-10M on LFO's Frequencies (Warp, 1991). Mark Bell and Gez Varley used it on the title track. Aphex Twin used one on a lot of his early records. The FZ series came out of Casio's late-eighties professional line, alongside the calculators and the VL-Tone.

The samples are mono, the envelopes take a while to learn, and the filters smear the signal in a way that is hard to describe and very pleasant to hear.

uber weird filter architecture, dig/analog hybrid

Aphex Twin, SYROBONKERS 2014

The thing about owning an FZ in 2026 is that getting a sample onto one is its own small project. You can put a real 3.5" floppy through a real drive, assuming the drive still works and you can find one of the disks the firmware will read. More often you fit a Gotek floppy emulator and load .img files from a USB stick. Either way you need the disk image. The disk format is from 1987 and has not had a lot of attention in 2026's tooling landscape. There is a primary document somewhere in a forum thread, there is a sampler in my rack, and there is a quiet gap between the two.

I have been spending time in that gap. Jacob Vosmaer wrote about the same problem a few years back, and some of his work was a starting point for mine. The loop is simple: read the spec, write the code, load the disk image onto the Gotek, and check what the bytes look like on the sampler's front panel. Repeat. It's a bit tedious. The FZ-10M's front panel is small to begin with, and one corner of mine is hard to read. Some of it lines up exactly with the 1987 document. Some of it does not. What I've been working on should be ready in a few weeks. There will be a short video to go with it.