Circuitbenders Forum
Circuitbenders Forum => Banter => Topic started by: Circuitbenders on April 28, 2009, 01:16:45 AM
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If you have a piece of kit you especially loathe and you consider vastly overrated then this is the thread for you!
I'll start things off with the Casio VL1 which, and lets be generous here, is a piece of crap. I completely fail to see the magic with the VL1. There is nothing you could do on a VL1 that you couldn't do better on a million other cheap machines. So its got an ADSR and a calculator, WOW! Neither of these things is exactly incredible. My phone has more music making power than a VL1 AND it makes phonecalls! It probably cost less as well. :-\
But what about that fantastic cheesy percussion you say. Well isn't this what the sampler was created for is my reply. Its not like the VL1 is analogue or has any kind of magic feel to the percussion you'd want to preserve.
What i don't understand is that people are still are trying incredibly hard to circuitbend these things and cram mods into them when realistically even the best modded VL-1's aren't anything very special and don't produce any sounds you couldn't produce a lot better and with more versatility on other machines more easily and cheaper.
So you can do some exciting things like distorting the sounds and making some feedback noises. Well ok, but for less money you could get a yamaha pss and make a noise like an old woman drowning in a washing machine in a car compactor. Take your pick.
Now the Roland TR606........................ Just don't get me started on the goddamn 606. ::)
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but for less money you could get a yamaha pss
EDIT: Hey, where has the text of my post gone? When i looked here today, only the qoute was here and my own text was missing??!?!?!?!?!?!?
What i wanted to say was that i think that crustypaul maybe was inspired to open this thread here by my post in the fleamarket topic. And that i only paid 3 Euro for it. And that i never saw a PSS with a number higher than 50 go for less on eBay. And that aforementioned PSS-50 would be one of my hate-objects concerning music-hardware which is only beaten by the AKAI S3000i i bought brandnew in the mid nineties of the last century for more than 5000 DM and nowadays i won't even get 100 Euro on eBay for it. Which is what i probably hate most when thinking about this machine... besides the microscopic small RAM and lack of HD or CDROM and the abolutely overrated digital filters...
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So you can do some exciting things like distorting the sounds and making some feedback noises. Well ok, but for less money you could get a yamaha pss and make a noise like an old woman drowning in a washing machine in a car compactor. Take your pick.
I'd take the sound of dying grannies any day.
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EDIT: Hey, where has the text of my post gone? When i looked here today, only the qoute was here and my own text was missing??!?!?!?!?!?!?
What i wanted to say was that i think that crustypaul maybe was inspired to open this thread here by my post in the fleamarket topic.
I was wondering why you had just posted a quote there, wierd.
It was indeed triggered by that post in the fleamarket thread but also by people paying anything up to £40 for an unmodded VL1 on ebay and absurd amounts for a VL1 with even the most useless mods on it. I don't understand at all.
I never liked Akai's, apart from the S612 and the S6000 which wierdly were their first ever and last ever rackmount samplers.
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people paying anything up to £40 for an unmodded VL1 on ebay and absurd amounts for a VL1 with even the most useless mods on it. I don't understand at all.
Thats really stupid. How much fun it ever is playing with the ADSR (which i really like) and else but paying more than ~10 Euro is just stupid... my humble opinion...
I never liked Akai's, apart from the S612 and the S6000 which wierdly were their first ever and last ever rackmount samplers.
The S6000 at least had the ability to load .wav files without a conversion-orgy, afaik... the S3000i hadn't. One more point on the 'why i hate that thing' list.
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Damn right about VL. I can only put it's popularity down to there being a band out there who happened to use one for ten seconds in a track so it's suddenly "hey, if i use a VL too then i can be famous" haha. I watched a vid awhile back of a '9 mod monster' and decided to see if i could make my own means to blow people away. I succeeded, and yeah, you've got a bunch of drone mods, some squelchyness and feedback, a pitch mod and some cool atari video game system style noises if you can be arsed to mod it that far. I added an lfo which made it almost worth having for it's commodore 64 like qualities with the rate cranked right up. All this and not much more for whatever you're stupid enough to pay for one. You're much better off picking up a pt1 or pt10. Same crap sounds but a bigger case to stick all the bits in when you mod it. There's no earth shattering ADSR or calculator but they go for as little as £2.99 sometimes. And this to me is about how much i'd pay for the VL tone on a good day.
In joint first place for being crap though. I'd put the Roland mc303 up there in the ranks of absolute shite. I owned one of these years ago which i bought on a whim. Got it home, tried it out, laughed at how piss poor it was, chucked it in the cupboard and then found it again four years later and sold it. In a way i wish i'd kept it as it would have made an interesting core for a circuit bent project.
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Ahhhh, the MC303. A machine that the original Future Music review said was 'indistinguishable from a TB303'. :D
I never tire of that quote, i've even got the magazine to prove it somewhere. Just goes to show how deaf you can be when you're getting given synths for free. ::)
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Haha, yes i remember now. This was part of the attraction of an mc303 back then. I remember thinking 'cool, a tb303 with bells on'. I was just gob smacked at how piss poor it was when i got it. I tried to like it. I also tried really hard and spent a fair bit of time trying to discover the similarities to a tb303. As you can imagine i failed miserably.
On the other hand, i don't see them selling for much these days so i guess they are in the crap place they deserve to be now ;D
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On the other hand, i don't see them selling for much these days so i guess they are in the crap place they deserve to be now ;D
... and in ten years time there will be a whole genre of music based on rediscovering how to (mildly ab)use MC-303s beyond what they were designed to do, prices will shoot up and magazines will be full of quotes like "It's hard to believe now, but back in 2009 people didn't want them and they sold at bargain-basement prices!"
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You're probably right there. Like every TR except the 808 or 909. They were all considered to be shite. I often wish i'd kept more of the crap gear i had from back then. A bent mc303 would probably be really cool assuming it wanted to play nice. It's probably not worth trying but i reckon i'll watch a few on ebay and see if i can get one to put on the slab. If the sequencer and the sound rom are seperately clocked even an ltc1799 mod would turn it into something quite interesting. It'll likely end up in the bin and raped for parts by the end of it but what the hell. If it doesn't i'll post it up on here with some info on where and where not to go...
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I sorry but I think casio sks are a bit overated...sure they sound good but there is nothing there that i cant get out of my miracle piano or voltaik detachable synthesizer sytem .I mean they are easy to do and look good but theyve been practacaly used to death they only have a sample time of a half a second and cost where i live five times as much as the tow vss-30s ive got in my house not only that but when i was a kid i saw many of the sk-1-,5,8s but now i ant see any of them ANYWHERE!!!!!! im sorry but people should be a bit more adventerous and try other smpling stuff like the yamaha psr-215 and other stuff liek that.cos if amateurs keep bending them theyll be extinct within 2015 if that!!!
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erm.... the Yamaha PSR215 doesn't sample. :-\
I agree about the SK's sampling though, the VSS30 sounds a whole lot better, which is probably why they are selling for stupid money at the moment.
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And so are the casio sk models at the moment ...i went in the ad mags and someone was offering upto a hundred pounds for one aswell as ebay where they have sold unbent for upto one hundred and fourty poundsI mean they werent even woth that when they were new.so..im not getting one and they are FRICKING hard to find now...almost impossible unless you WANT to fork out a hundred pounds for one without a bloody box with three keys missing >:(
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TB-303 is shitein my own oppinion but my old teaher had one and he would rant about how in his old punk band it was the best sounding instrument he had ever had and every one liked it they must have had their hearing aids turned off or it was they were trying to be nice
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The Yamaha mr10.
The 606 is as cool as an elektron machinedrum when compared to these piles of shit. They obviously don't fetch as much as tr's but they still change hands for way more than they're worth just because the word analogue gets associated with them.
Absolute bollocks ........
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This is all down to ebay culture though isn't it?
Outside of ebay you wouldn't get £5 for an MR10, just like you'd be lucky to get £10 for a 606 at a car boot sale.
Get a few thousand rabid analogue electro obsessives looking at it and suddenly its a 'classic bit of retro kit' ::)
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the hype around bending is probably quite a cause for prices going up as well - most crappy keyboards on ebay have "CIRCUIT BENDING!!!!" in the description. hype is good but price is bad ::)
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You have GOT (http://cgi.ebay.com/Vintage-CASIO-VL-TONE-VL-1-Electronic-Keyboard-in-Box_W0QQitemZ300339778352QQcmdZViewItemQQptZKeyboards_MIDI?hash=item45eda55330&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14) to be shitting me. And that's not the only VL-1 going for around $70 right now.
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Not sure what the exchange rate is but i've seen them go regularly for £35+ over here. And in contrast a PT1 or 10 will sometimes go for as little as 99p even though it's pretty much the same thing. Who in the limelight of the world of music has used a vl to make them so fashionable then?
Kanye west? :'(
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maybe it's the calculator?
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Nobody is buying that one for circuit bending though, or probably not even to ever use. That one is going to sit there in someones collection with all is original packaging gathering value.
I've got an absolutely mint condition TR505 with pristine original packaging and documentation which i suspect will probably be worth more as a collectors item than as a circuitbent machine, which is kind of tragic.
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I think the most redeeming aspect of the VL-1 is that it's build quality is quite respectable and it doesn't have that same cheap, hollow flimsiness that so many other comparable toys and keyboards have.
Apart from that, it's a piece of crap... but a most curious one at that.
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My phone has more music making power than a VL1 AND it makes phonecalls! It probably cost less as well.
You can't exactly compare technologies that are decades apart... especially when it comes to devices like phones and calculators. And to give Casio some credit... the VL-1 is actually a calculator, not a musical instrument.
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You can't exactly compare technologies that are decades apart...
Yes i can, in fact i just did, you can see it up there. ;)
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You can't exactly compare technologies that are decades apart...
Yes i can, in fact i just did, you can see it up there. ;)
LOL... ummm, so you did :D *claps loudly*
Seriously though, it's a little like comparing a 2008 model Toyota Corolla with a 1980's Vespa Scooter. They both serve a similar function, but that's where the similarities end. Your phone and the VL-1 are both innovative because they attempt to combine more than one function, or machine, into a single hand-held unit. Due to the limits of technology in the 80's it just wasn't possible to create something like your phone... and back in the 80's, something like a calculator that could play music would have been considered a 'miracle' in modern technology and miniaturization ... which we now see from jaded eyes.
I admire the VL-1 for what it was able to achieve back then. And for what it was able to do, it did it well. It was probably the best miniature musical instrument you could buy for it's price at the time... though I think combining a calculator and piano would have to be one of the silliest ideas ever.
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Couldn't agree with you more on the VL-1's. Why even bother bending them when you can get the same results just about by playing it through a distortion pedal.
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I always find it interesting to find that people are spending so much on these old, crappy things that they surpass the original MSRP. IMHO, if you want to be a Casio collector, that's cool if you want to spend 75 bucks for a VL-1 to complete your collection. As most of us more-veteran benders remember, the whole point of circuit bending at the beginning was that it was a great way to repurpose unused, boxed-and-closeted toys and keyboards and entry-level studio equipment from friends, family, and Goodwill/Oxfam. Now that every guy and his brother are hearing about circuit bending, the demand for vintage stuff is too high and the creativity is too low, and everybody is asking "can you please tell me how to do everything to my Casio xx-xx?" or the youtube comments "how much do you charge for this?". If you bend for business, that's awesome that you get paid to do what youl like, and spread experimental instruments out there for others, but the consumers are really missing the point, then, which is that Circuit Bending is supposed to be a personal, creative, challenging journey that ends in victory (and sometimes, gut-wrenching tragedy, like when i killed my Casiotone CT-390). Sharing ideas and bends are great, but the lack of pioneer spirit is killing the art/science/waste-of-an-afternoon.
But we're on the cutting edge if we can turn our backs on building the same SK-1s that we've been doing for years (and nothing against the SK-Xs, and their builders), and move on to other things. I interviewed Q. Reed G. for my paper zine Search&Rescue, and he told me about a lot of his new ideas for new things. Think about all the 2 megapixel digital cameras, the vcrs, the cd players, the hammond transister organs that clog thrift stores and suburban garages/basements/curbsides we can be rewiring to oblivion. Maybe we can take it as a sign from Fate and walk away from the Speak&Spells and black blob Kawasaki keyboards and use this as a learning opportunity and personal challenge. The demand for the Casiotones and Yamaha VSSs will die, but the art wont.
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TB-303 is shitein my own oppinion but my old teaher had one and he would rant about how in his old punk band it was the best sounding instrument he had ever had and every one liked it they must have had their hearing aids turned off or it was they were trying to be nice
in that case order me up a big plate of shite please ... but seriously the tb303 is the cornerstone of dance misic , its the sound of revolution ...whats not to like , the tr909 nothing creates the amount of sound pressure that a 909 creates standing in front of speakers with a 909 playing is an experience like no other i tried 100s of samples for decades and nothing even comes close , as for shite over rated instruments well you could basically lump in any grooveboxes for want of a better word particularily the roland mc909 what a humungus pile of garbage, sounds like a trip to disneyland, duibious timing, w*nk sequencing , boring sampling capaibilities £1499 yeah mate ill take 2
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You'd probably spend more on a Casio VL-1 these days than a Yamaha VL-1.
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You'd probably spend more on a Casio VL-1 these days than a Yamaha VL-1.
when you think about it like that its just bizarre. I got a Korg Prophecy a while back for £65. I've seen unbent Casio VL1's go for that and bent ones go for 3 or 4 times more. Which has really got the most music making potential?
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surely it must be the VL tone ;D well on second thoughts.......
maybe you could just use the calculator on it to work out how much you've been ripped of for!!!! I actually have one of these pieces of shit lying in my workroom, i switched it on last week-total rubbish i dont think even 20 killer mods could save this turkey.
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I agree. VL's bore me 99% of the time. Once in a while I'll see something interesting, but I think it's mainly HOW the people are playing it, not the mods. A cool melody can sound cool on anything.