About a month ago, I said I’d take photos of my cheap keyboard collection for Gemma and Sophie of The Deirdres. This morning I finally got around to doing it!

The full gallery, in all it’s slightly disappointing camera-phone glory, is HERE, but click below for a GUIDED TOUR!

This is the Realistic Concertmate-650, better known as the Casio SK-5 – I think Realistic were an own-brand type version run by Tandy or somebody like that, but all their keyboards were just Casio keyboards with different logos printed on the case. It has four sample slots (or two longer ones) which sound really excellently cheap and grainy. It has a built in microphone but also a jack socket, it’s quite fun plugging a guitar into it.

This is Yamaha’s version of a cheap sampler, the VSS-200. It has more functions and RAW POWER than the Casio one, but isn’t as easy or fun to mess around with. It does have one great function though – you can press a button to sample in any of the 100 built-in sounds and then reverse / loop / mess with them. Also it has the sound that Grandaddy used on “Laughing Stock” and “Everything Beautiful is Far Away” on their first album, it’s called COMET, I think.

This is the Casio PT-30. It’s monophonic but has separate chord / accompaniment buttons on the left that either blare out chords or play excellent basslines along with the cheesy drums. It’s really good! I have two but one is a bit broken and doesn’t turn on most of the times. Hefner used one of these on their song “Karen”, which isn’t all that good, but still.

This is the Casio PT-10. I have four of these for some reason although I’m not sure how many work, they were all bought for a pound each at car boot sales. They do the excellent bleepy drums that were used in “Da Da Da” by Trio and lots of other songs BUT not quite as good, I think it’s the VL-1 that is more famous but those are trickier to find. It’s basically quite rubbish.

The Casio SA-2 and Casio SA-21 have the same sounds, but the bigger one has more, plus drum pads and stuff, and is better in every imaginable way. It sounds really cheap and awful, both of which are GOOD THINGS. I think it features on some Mascot Fight demos as I let Sean borrow it a couple of times.

The Casiotone MT-35 and MT-65 are vaguely similar, and I think they’re from the same family as the one Doktor Coca-Cola McDonalds uses. They have dials and sliders and look quite cool but don’t sound all that great. The 35 has a really weird clean sound like they couldn’t really be bothered to make the instruments sound like instruments, so just filled it with sine waves.

The Yamaha PSS-20 is hilariously awful. The best feature is the button “GAME: ON / OFF” which plays a dreadful tune that seems to have no game element whatsoever. Without an instruction book, all I can do is press the button and laugh.

I got my Yamaha SHS-10 for a frankly ridiculous ONE POUND from a car boot sale in Measham, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch. It has a missing F key but you can still play the note by poking a finger into the hole. It sounds GREAT! Bearsuit have a side project called Keytarded where the three girls all play these. Also they go for silly money on eBay but I guess mine wouldn’t because it’s a bit knacked. It’s really good for cheap dirty bass sounds though.

The Roland SH-101 is a world-famous bass machine and all-round excellent thing. Mine DOES NOT WORK. But it was only £5 so I guess I can’t really complain. I can just sigh a lot and wonder if I should throw it away or keep it under my bed forever.

DRUM MACHINE! This is the Yamaha DD-10, previously owned by such Derby alumni as Dave from Plans and Apologies and Steve from Dead by Dawn. The paper attached to the top is the setlist for the first gig by THE MEN, which is the only real time this has been used – Rob played it live on “Theme from THE MEN”. It even has two pedals for bass drum / hi-hats.

Last but not least, the Korg DDM-110 aka SUPERDRUMS was another car-boot purchase (I bought it from a CHILD) and unfortunately inhabits that middle ground where it doesn’t sound good enough to be “good” OR bad enough to be “really good”. It’s ALRIGHT I guess. I used it on the Vom Vorton song “BST”.

I also have a Casio synth thing that is very similar to the one Russell used to use in The Research, but it is currently ON LOAN to a friend. I will add pictures of that one day, maybe. It’s pretty cool.

GALLERY END!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 11:54 am and is filed under photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.