mini keyboards, praises for Casios, Yamahas, tablehonkers et

[shedshrine]

In any case,
Here's my poor man's DX7, funky sliders can be "played". Put the pitch shift all the way down to some snazzy bass snarffles. stereo RCA outs, phones, speakers.
What's not to like. they threw in the AKG's for $3. whee..

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[shedshrine]

Here's some of my others. Never paid the crazy amount some of these seem to go for. Never been too interested in mutilating, i mean circuit bending them. Just run them through pedals and whatnot to get more extreme sounds. Wouldn't mind adding outs on a couple though.

[kslight]

I have maybe ~20 or so cheapos mixed in with my vintage keys. The Yamahas are really interesting and unpredictable circuit-bent. I kind of feel like the Casios all start to sound the same when bent...

The other day I busted out my Casiotone MT-520 to lay down some beats (it has built in drum pads...). Poor man's 808 I guess... What's really kind of interesting about it is that it has trigger outs for the drum pads. Even though the stock sounds are pretty lame, and this guy is not yet circuit bent, when I ran the drums into my Electric Filter Queen I was able to find some boom tone, then into my looper because it would be tough to play this thing all the way through a song and be halfway accurate (triggering not exactly flawless + I'm not a great drummer).

[percussion boy]

Cheap mini-key instruments rule at my house. In fact the first keyboard I owned was one of the original analog Yamaha Portasounds that came in this little formfitting suitcase.

The later Portas that have the five-slider FM synth ( as in some of the pics above) can sound cool. One of the fancier ones, somewhere in the 400s, also has a nice preset FM bass sound.

The superstar minis are the casio cz101 and the yammy dx100, which are real synths in small packages. DX100 prices seem to be returning to earth in recent years, as techno recedes into the rear view mirror. You can get one for $200 or so and it's worth it.

There is also a NEW mini, the Casio SA76, that carries on the tradition honorably. $75, decent sounds, tacky rhythm patterns, speakers, so light and plastic it would probably float.

[Gregg Juke]

I have an SK-1. Love it!

GJ

[kslight]

The superstar minis are the casio cz101 and the yammy dx100, which are real synths in small packages. DX100 prices seem to be returning to earth in recent years, as techno recedes into the rear view mirror. You can get one for $200 or so and it's worth it.

I played with a CZ101 a long time ago, was pretty cool for what it was...recently there was a CZ5000 at a pawn shop but for some reason that didn't do it for me...even though I thought they were pretty similar... $200 seems like a lot of money for a cheese ball keyboard though...every last one of my analog synths I bought for less than that (of course that is sort of a dumb luck kind of thing...).

[EasyGo]

I found a Yahama SHS-10 (the red keytar that plays Wham's 'Last Christmas' as a demo) for $6 in a pawn shop, and my 4-year-old is all over it. Although it's a toy, it has some pretty useful patches. Until recently, I had another Yamaha toy keyboard that was fun, particularly for its bass sounds (brass and oboe).

+1 for the SK-1. I took one of those to my son's 'Rhythm Week' at his preschool and let the kids create and sample their own animal noises. About 80% of them LOVED it, and the remaining 20% acted as though they had heard the voice of Satan.

Although it's not really a toy, I get the most mileage out of my Roland Alpha Juno One analog keyboard, found by my wife cheap at a yard sale. It's not velocity sensitive, but the pizzacato/harp-type sounds and the Farfisa-type patch are great. I would love to learn to program that thing. Apparently it's a legit keyboard for the techno/rave set, as it makes the 'hoovers'/vacuum cleaner-type sound.