Tech Report: Casio Rapman RAP-1 Sample Kit

The Casio Rapman is probably the most bizarre of all Casio toy keyboards from the 80s and 90s. The RAP-1 is the first of the two Rap-themed keyboards from the big 'C' and was released in 1991. I actually do remember the weird TV-ads from German TV that used to promote this thing between shows like "Saber Rider" and "Chuck the Beaver" on the now defunct Tele 5 cartoon channel... Well, to be fair, the Rapman doesn't sound at all like the music from the ads, but that might have disappointed many a wannabe white-bread rapper back then only... Today, in the age of the Triton and software samplers, the cheesiness that emerges from the small built-in speaker has a certain appeal to it that you can't get anywhere else...




The two main features of this fun little machine are the neat pseudo-vocoder effect and the surprisingly good drums. You can either trigger kick, snare and cowbell yourself with little orange rubber-pads or play 25 pre-programmed rhythms and create wacky breaks with a scratchweel. Some of those beats even come with a funky bassline and sound like they were pulled from some lost "Prince of Bel Air" soundtrack or a never released Vanilla Ice comeback album... Wouldn't it be nice to have those sounds on your MPC or Machinedrum or load them in Battery?

That's what I thought, but since I couldn't find any decent samples of this forgotten classic online, I decided to make the definite kit myself for everybody to enjoy and to use in their own productions. This means that you can use them how and as you please in your creative process, as long as you don't distribute them in any way other than this collection which must include this disclaimer, don't modify them, don't include them in commercial sample compilations or charge money for them in any way without my written consent. If you make a smash-hit with these samples, please let me know and consider a small donation...

The samples were taken directly from the line-out of my own Rapman, operating on a fresh set of batteries and recorded into Logic Express at 16-Bit/44.1 kHz resolution. While being recorded, the output of the RP-1 was at the highest possible level to give you the maximum signal-to-noise ratio. The samples were then carefully cut and processed with a touch of compression to give them a little more punch.

I made a clean and normalized 16-Bit version of each sound first and used Logic's Bitcrusher plugin to create three variations of each. So there is not only a 16-Bit sample but also a 12-, 8-, and 4-Bit version, so you get maximum variety... While decreasing the bit-rate, I also increased downsampling in order to make the variations even more dirty (check out the nice 12-Bit snare for example).

The final samples were all exported as mono 16-Bit/44.1 kHz .wav-files so you can load them into your sampler of choice. In addition to the individual samples, I created a program for Akai's MPC2000xl with the samples laid out in rows and the bit-rate decreasing from left to right. The program should be working on other MPCs like the 2000 too, but don't take my word for it.

You can download the kit here... (380k ZIP archive)

Enjoy the sample kit of this lo-fi classic and feel free to send me your comments.