Apparently, the thing was originally designed
to be produced solely as a 'musical instrument' (I use the term
loosely!).
One of the four Kashio brothers who founded the company
was a would-be musician as well as an electronics engineer and he
had designed a simple and inexpensive LSI (Large Scale Integration)
chip that could be used for musical purposes but executives at the
company weren't confident that it had enough features to sell in
its own right so some bright spark at Casio had the idea to add
(no pun intended!) a calculator! Obvious really! What else would
you add to a small, portable musical instrument?! I guess that as
one of the world's leaders in calculator manufacture, they had the
technology for free.
As well as being a calculator, it could also be powered
up in a mode that offered a handful of monophonic 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.
It was something of a novelty gadget along the lines
of a Stylophone and sounded pretty poor through its own small speaker
but played through the line output, it could sound fairly reasonable,
so much so that It was used by the Human League, Devo, The Cars
and others - even Stevie Wonder is alledged to have used one!
However, it was the German band 'Trio' who gave the VL-Tone
its finest moment of fame in their record "DaDaDa" which
was a huge huge hit (especially in Europe) and which used one of
the VL-Tone's preset rhythms as its foundation. That song (or a
pastiche of it) is still used today as the soundtrack for a washing
machine manufacturer's TV ads.
The VL-Tone achieved a certain cult status and was used
in later years by Moby and Goldie and others. And despite its obvious
limitations, the VL-Tone sold 1,000,000 units in its five year lifetime
(1979-1984). This success obviously spurred Casio on to get more
involved in the music business and they later went on to release
polyphonic variations on the technology with full size keyboards
(without the in-built calculator!) and beyond. In later years, they
brought us the FZ1 sampler, the CZ and VZ range of phase-distortion
synthesisers and the RZ1 sampling drum machine.
The soundset in Nostalgia includes the VL-Tone's presets
as well as the the famous 'Trio' drum loop. All the sounds except
the 'Trio' program are mapped out from C1-C6 - the 'Trio' drum sample
is on C3 only. The samples themselves are just loops of the raw
waveform - the envelopes and vibrato, etc., are re-created in the
Kompakt program. |