October 31, 2004
#262 :: Casio VL-Tone
Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Still unwritten is a corollary to that axiom regarding dead-tech. Bluntly put: any sufficiently primitive digital technology is indistinguishable from non-digital technology. The Casio VL-Tone "pocket" synthesizer (1979-1984) is a brick of plastic and moron-grade silicon posing as a musical instrument. With 29 on-off buttons and a few sliders controlling a programmable synthesizer and simple calculator, the VL-Tone is a definitive chip-age relic, as stuck in time as Atari joystick game consoles and Pulsar digital watches. You can read a fine, geeky appreciation here, which says in part:
As well as being a calculator, it could also be powered up in a mode that offered a handful of monphonic sounds that could be played from the two-octave 'keyboard' (an inappropriate term for the row of unplayable and unreliable switches you can see above). The VL-Tone had four 'instrumental' sounds - Flute, Piano, Guitar and Violin. To describe these sounds as 'realistic' would be highly misleading. There was also one preset 'synth' sound plus another called 'ADSR' which could be 'programmed' using the calculator part of the unit - by typing in obscure strings of numbers, you could make rudimentary changes to the sound's amplitude envelope and also tremolo and vibrato rates. All the sounds could also be transposed up or down by one octave using a dedicated slider switch. It also had a simple 100-step sequencer.But for true appreciation, you need to hear it played live. For a while I dabbled with running it through an electric guitar amp. More than 20 years ago, it sounded amazing. They sold a million of them.
This one still works. You can find others for less than $20 on eBay.