An interesting thing about the RZ1 is that it's the first proper drum machine from Casio.

Pause for thought, then tell me who else produces a drum machine that samples as standard and is affordable by unrich musicians who aren't swarming about in 48 track studios waiting to buy the new Fairlight update.

Yes sir, nobody (until now) produces this rare species of affordableness. Emulator produce something similar, and so do Linn, but their concept of affordableness is the three-grand-plus market.

Which certainly isn't mine.

The price? an RRP of £395 which probably means £350 for cash. For the ackers, you get a fully programmable drum machine with 12 digitally encoded drum noises plus — and this is the big plus — the facility to put your own drum (or not) sounds in.

Talking of noises, what does it sound like? Pretty damn good.

At this price it's surprising to find that the only really naff sound is the claps which sound like, well, a few gnats chomping away on their dinner. But stick it through a desk, stick your Phil Collins gated reverb on them and they're... baaaad! Nothing like claps, but good anyway.

A friend of the percussion persuasion said that the cowbell was excellent and was quite startled by the crash cymbal which is nice and rude. The bass drum was deemed to be 'solid' and the snare has a nice crack to it, sadly missing on most cheap beat boxes. When confronted with the toms, the sticky one laughed and said they were shit; but I found them OK, personally.

What you have to remember is that you can really tart up an average-sounding drum box when you can use the separate outputs through a mixing desk. OK, so they were noisy, but when was the last time you heard a real tom without buzzes and rattles and general boinginess all over the place?

What Casio think will see off the competition is the user-sampling tag. What is good is that it sounds good and that it's a piece of piss to sample something easily.

You can have four short samples, two slightly longer ones, or one longish noise. As with most cheapish samplers it's best suited to short, sharp sounds to keep the noise quotient at bay. The great thing is that the machine stores your samples when it's switched off. This is magic as you can put your favourite bass and snare samples in f'rinstance and then listen to your crazed meanderings the next day with said samples intact.

Talking of buttons, the Casio is idiot-proof in that nearly all the buttons have only one function. This means that you don't have to spend a week reading some wretched manual in order to use the thing. You can bash away in real time or prod away in non-real time — sometimes caused by acute drunkenness, but more often called step time. You also get the choice of beats-to-the-bar, autocorrection, erasing duff beats and all the other things taken for granted on serious beat boxes.

"But what about the sampling?" I hear being moaned. Well all that you need to know is that it works, it's easy and my drumming friend was even more startled when he heard the massive gated ambient snare and bass drum samples I'd put in.

It seems like the more level you put in when sampling, the merrier the result. You even get two cheap tone controls, posing as filters, to cut down noise on the samples. Cowbells, snares, percussion, guitars, and the hilarious Japanese man on the supplied tape all sounded good.

I won't tell you it's got MIDI in, out and through as I'm pissed off with its overkill recently. I will tell you I liked the accent and mute buttons which work on each drum separately, not on each beat. And you can save your favourite samples, patterns and songs on tape which has to be good news.

The bit I didn't like was its inability to cope with me wanting to mess around switching from pattern to pattern to see which bits go well together. The War And Peace length manual didn't offer enlightenment either unfortunately. Still, predictably it will clean up in the drum box market and deservedly so. Join the queue now!

CASIO RZ-1: £395