Casio VL-1
Description : Small toy calculators with some keyboard sounds and rythms.
Production period : 1979-1984
Numbers made : Thousands.
Keys : 29
Used by : Apollo 440, Devo, the Talking Heads, the Cars, Sting ( this sounds odd to my ears…Anyone out there with any idea ? ), Stevie Wonder, The Human League, Trio, White Town, and Bill Nelson.
Description : This is one of those keyboards that in comparison to how much it costs gets a lot of usage in the studio. The Vl-tone series ( 1, 10 & 5 ) started out as calculators from Casio but had some cool extra features such as a little keyboard and rythm section. I think they were Casios first venture into the keyboard market.
The sounds are all very thin sounding and basic but because of that I find them to be very usable when you treat them. They have the soundquality of a greeting. The Vl-5 has even got a step sequencer where you can record I think it is 4 different patterns which in effect becomes very very handy. The rythms are very basic sounding but in a really cool skeletal electronic way. Another super cool feature is the reader pen that comes with it which is for reading of music. With the Vl-tone you could get songs that were programmed as barcodes. These were loaded into the synth by pulling the reader over a barcode. Apparently this never worked and even during demonstrations people had to try 10 or 20 times to get the reader to actually read the barcode.
These synths have been used on Molesome ( mostly rythms ), Devi, Celestine and above all Nanook of the north where for instance the main arpeggio line on Karin boyes grave is played by using the step sequencer through a leslie. Devi have even started to use one live…brave band.
Foot note : Opinions vary on the quality of VL-1. On the Vintagesynth site the people who run the site gave it a one star rating whilst the publics opinion gave it a 4.6 out of 5. Anyways here is a link to a fan site of the Vl-1 www.unhacker.com/maximumcheesecore.html
See a beautiful video of Tobbe playing the VL-1
