Casio SK-1 | Hacker News Reader

Casio SK-1

vintagesynth.com

84 pointsbrudgers48 comments

Even cheaper - in every conceivable respect - was the Casio VL-1. It had one unforgettable performance though:

Don't forget Whitetown's Your Woman. I think the rest of it was done on an Atari ST Falcon.

From which the key catchy sample is also used in the recent 'Love Again' by Dua Lipa... which originally dates from Lew Stone & the Monseigneur Band's 'My Woman' from the 1930s. [0]

It was fun listening to the 3 songs in reverse chronological order with my 11 year old, particularly the moment we realised it was played on a muted trumpet originally and sped up with each resampling, eventually sounding more like strings.

[0] https://www.whosampled.com/sample/729975/Dua-Lipa-Love-Again...

Casio MT-40 also has quite a story to tell

https://youtu.be/4zpjGXH4umQ

The story is even more interesting than that video makes it out to be!

Hiroko Okuda, the woman who programmed Sleng Teng was (and still is) a Casio employee who had just graduated from school with a degree in musicology. She was a fan of reggae and wrote her thesis on reggae. So, it seems the whole thing is circular!

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2015-12-04-casio-and-the-sleng-teng...

Sleng teng riddim! I wish I could have experienced this on one of the huge Jamaican soundsystems of that era. Before sleng teng, dancehall music was all done with acoustic bass. This changed the game, no one had ever heard bass like that before

I've got both, and still have them. I rarely touch them, though. They're toys rather than instruments to me.

At this point, they should be treated as collectibles.

Enjoy - https://www.casiomusicforums.com/index.php?/topic/11993-vl-1...

Awesome. My colleague just bought one of them on the used market. They flip around the second hand market for the price of a couple or four cases of beer

A word on Casio. In the past few years I've bought a low end calculator with aspirations of being a scientific calculator and a low end sample player for my young son.

Both purchases offered a surprisingly high value for money, especially in the price points. I think the calculator was ~$15 retail and the sample player was ~$60 as I recall... both about 2 or so years ago.

The sample player (Casio SA-76), really a toy, was really good for what it was: it can be battery powered and the batteries last a very long time, decent sounds and features, and it even powers itself off if its not used for awhile. And given my son's treatment of the device (drops, throwing, etc) the fact that it still works at all is amazing, but it actually hasn't had any problems at all from the abuse... aside from scuffs on the case.

Don't get me wrong, no one is going to mistake these for high end tools, but on their own terms they've been excellent purchases.

Similarly, I bought a Casio "Arranger Workstation" (CTK6250) a couple of years ago, and while a) It is more expensive in absolute terms at $200-$300 new, and b) It has its own level of cheesiness; nonetheless the functionality and value for money is absolutely astounding. For a kid starting to learn about music today, it's an all-in one that can last a tremendously long time - built-in decent speakers, battery or mains, more than good-enough sounds and a large variety, plus a sequencer, arranger, and while you have to menu-dive, you can in fact modify its sounds to a fair extent. The arranger part in particular can really motivate a new learner to explore and play and fool around :)

It in fact makes it tricky to upgrade - "next level" from Roland or Korg is probably $1000, $1500 or more.

I've since, erm, geeked out about synths and acquired a pointlessly-expensive selection to tinker with - but the Casio is now firmly in the family room for my 2 year old and myself to play. I don't see selling or giving it away anytime soon... it's the Honda CBR125 of electronic keyboards, the little engine that could and is just sheer exhilarating fun of its own :)

Casio calculators are awesome. It's great that in my country we use them (and their even cheaper counterfeits!) instead of some overpriced TI crap.

I had an SK-1 for a couple of years. I think I paid $12 at a gooodwill around 2009.

I play a bunch of musical instruments, including keys and I also have a pretty good grasp on synthesis, and that helped me get more out of the instrument.

I honestly think it is a pretty cool cheap instrument if you know what you're doing. It's like the pocket operators/ volcas/ tiny korg synths / etc in that it basically looks like a toy and you can do some pretty cheesy things with it.

I know I did. I really enjoyed just playing songs using it as a super goofy backing band.

At the same time, it has a n okay synth in it... one that is very inexpensive and unique for early oughts (thought it certainly wasn't cheap when it came out by my standards).

The sampler is hard to use, but like anything creative people can do a lot with it's limitations... I used it to sample pitched instruments, and it worked pretty well for that. Not to mention that it was super easy to use.

Casio also made some full spec samplers in the 80s that were well regarded and used on many classic records.

Bay Area producer domino used the rack version of this on the souls of mischief album. http://www.vintagesynth.com/casio/fz1.php

The fz-1 and fz-10 were/are amazing machines. The only comparable gear from that era was the Synclavier which was 10x the price.

Aside from the sampling abilities, the onscreen wave editing is just amazing. One of the most underrated digital synths ever made IMHO.

After a false start called the ZZ-1, the FZ-1 was the eventual output of an R&D project called Cosmo. Isao Tomita and some of the YMO people consulted on it.

https://encyclotronic.com/synthesizers/casio/casio-cosmo-syn...

https://acreil.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/casio-cosmo-synthesi...

You could do all of this today with a VST.

I remember buying an FZ-1 when they were being blown out (like most of my synths at the time). It sounded really good and was relatively easy to do simple sampling, but the UI especially on that postage stamp sized grey LCD made it hard to do much else. I actually had a lot more fun with my stone age Ensoniq Mirage. That whole era was one of good sounding ROMplers with nearly impenetrable software (I'm especially remembering my K1000s).

Bad Gear has a good video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySiGJmDCjG8

I can hear him vigorously raising both arms and shouting "WELCOME TO BAD GEAR, THE SHOW ABOUT THE WORST AUDIO TOOLS"

Yeah, I pretty much think of his "this ticks all the boxes" every time I am pluggin up some new bit of equipment.

Bad Gear's videos are great!

Not to be taken to the letter though. He criticizes the Alesis SR-16 for having a tape in-out interface as only way to back up data, which is 100% false since that drum machine implements MIDI Sysex messages allowing the use of software editors/librarians on a PC through the MIDI interface, which is pretty much every non ancient piece of gear still uses these days.

A pal got one of those when we were in college, and it will surprise precisely no one that we mostly used it to sample rude words, and then have the device play its demo song using the rude word as the voice.

Quality entertainment, for SURE.

We spent most of our recording burps and playing them back and making prank phone calls.

I have the successor to this model, the SK-5. I got it as a kid in the 80s and it still works great. My 6 year old has a great time sampling her voice and other sounds on it. In the past I considered trying a circuit bending project with it, but now I'm glad I left it intact. It's such a great little keyboard.

I got one of these a few years ago for 30$ because they were 'hip' in the lo-fi music community. Unfortunately it stopped working and sits in my closet now. I was going to get another one, but now they're even more hip and even more expensive. This piece is a perfect little insight into how memetic the used gear market is, IMO.

The circuits are pretty simple. Definitely servicable or saleable for parts.

Used to have fun circuit bending with a couple of these back in the mid-90s. A friend of mine had a college radio show and they were on a fundraising drive and I came on and threatened to continue to "torture" the poor machine on air until people donated. I don't recall how much $$ we made.

Interesting Link, led me to Circuit Bending an interesting topic too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27845556

I had one of these as a kid (got it from a friend) and managed break and then lose it. Found out only years later what people squeeze out of it :) Even without modification it was a kid's dream.

I also had one as a child. I just thought it was a keyboard, then one day I brought it to my aunt's house and she showed me it had a sampler built in. Queue all of the jams I made with weird noises and my voice.

I somehow managed to keep 2 of these from when I was a kid and passed them to my kids. They are still great fun but man do they burn through batteries.

Does anyone know which cheap toy Casio would refuse to play more than two keys at once? That's the one I had as a kid. The silly part was that my parents had a piano and I had piano lessons so.. there wasn't anything for me to do on that keyboard, really. It would be like consciously going back from touch typing to hunting and pressing one key at a time.

Casio PT-1 is the monophone that was big among kids in the 80s. https://synthmuseum.com/casio/caspt101.html

I've got an SK-1 and it is indeed 2-note polyphonic.

SK-1 has 4 note polyphony

Just looked it up and you're right. The polyphony drops to 2 notes when using the 'auto accompaniment' function though.

That demo song will never leave my head. And when I sing it, it's with a sample of someone saying "hi".

what is 'circuit bending'? And if it is so terrible why have blur, beck, et al all used it?

I'm not gonna pile on yet another explanation, as others have already done, but hope I can provide an example that is IMO less bizarre and ear-damage inducing: The 2005 film "Me and You and Everyone We Know" had its score[1] largely composed using a circuit-bent Casio SK-1[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtElSNMkums&list=OLAK5uy_kei...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_and_You_and_Everyone_We_Kno...

Amazing soundtrack, thanks a lot!

Circuit bending is the practice of modifying the electronics of musical instruments and toys that where never intended to be musical instruments in the first place. One common techniqe is to find the clock source of whatever microchip there may be and adding a way to change the clock rate. This can make for example furbys into tunable singers. Check out Look Mum No Computers furby organ on youtube for example.

https://youtu.be/GYLBjScgb7o

As for why it's used by all those famous musicians: I'd take that statement with a grain of salt, it's not like any of them used the SK-1 as their main instrument. But lots of people use limited and quirky stuff as inspiration, or for getting single unique sounds to mix into their works.

Circuit bending means modifying electronics to make more "interesting" sounds.

For example, people have soldered new connections to chips and even drilled holes in them to create intentional distortions.

As to why artists use it - well, there's always a use for kitschy things in art. If you need a lo-fi sample, perhaps this is the tool to look for.

[edit] Here's an example of a modified gameboy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ7eM6FfTXQ)

> if it is so terrible why have blur, beck, et al all used it?

Though the potential is generally limited, you can get surprisingly fun sounds from weird or bad gear. It's not like anyone is using an SK-1 as their main instrument for much of a full song, let alone an entire album

I had this exact model as a kid, spent countless hours playing with it. Might still be at my parents. Seems odd to be posted on HN.

Sampling was very fun, but it had a really nice synth brass sound.

I used to pretend I was doing the opening sounds to Thriller, but I needed another octave.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com