At the moment, this is just a blog about early home keyboards of the 1980s and early 1990s. Since I bought my first Casio — an MT-400V — a few years ago, I have been possessed by a fascination about these great, creative boxes.
While most of today’s keyboards are just plain boring — with sampled, realistic sounds — these early machines are just fascinating, and their analog sounds are weird, cheesy, cute and just plain lovely. Especially when fed through an effects pad… Also, during that early years, the manufacturers implemented many fun features, and the user interfaces was based on switches and knobs instead of forcing you to punch in numbers, which makes playing around with these keyboards just plain fun.
So here I’ll present the results of my researches about this esoteric topic, and I’ll also feature some of my favourite keyboards.
In the long run, I may also expand the theme of this blog to include other interests of mine, but at the moment, it’s just plain old keyboards… Have fun!
Comments
I completely agree with you – modern keyboards using samples are just boooooring. I guess in the old days, memory and sampling hardware was just impractical to implement on cheap, home keyboards, so the manufacturers had to find ingenious ways to try to create the sounds electronically and cheaply, giving each keyboard from that era its own, unique sound. It all started to go downhill with the introduction of FM Synthesis, in my view – but some FM synth keyboards do sound nice :-)
Looks like this’ll be an interesting blog – I’ll be checking back regularly :-)
This is a really interesting Website, I own a CT 410V, which I got for a few bucks, and its in a really gread condition. It even came with an original Casio volume pedal. Back in early eighties, this was my first Keyboard. I was 6 or 7 and luckily a Photo of me performing exists. ;)
25 Years later a great feeling to play on this baby! :-D
I’ll also check back regularly.