Music Thing: Casio VL-Tone

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment:

I can still remember how excited I was the first time I played with a Casio VL-Tone. In the very early '80s, simple LCD calculators seemed unimaginably high-tech. But the VL-Tone was a calculator with a built in synthesizer. It had five preset sounds, a 100 note sequencer and a little drum machine. You could even program the synth yourself, by typing numbers into the calculator (I never got beyond 99999999, which produced this long blipping noise that seemed ear-bogglingly strange.)

The VL-Tone was created by Toshio Kashio, an amateur musician and one of the Kashio brothers who founded Casio in 1946 ? it was his idea to build the electronic calculator that they launched in 1957. He helped to design the single-chip synth which could combine and filter square waves into simple sounds. Toshio?s brothers weren?t convinced that there was a market for such a tiny and obviously non-professional keyboard, so they added the calculator functions, imagining busy businessmen relaxing after a hard day?s accounting by playing along with the ?Rock? rhythm.
Of course, the brothers were wrong, and 1 million VL-Tones were sold between 1979 and 1984. Numerous musicians have recorded and sampled the sounds, apparently including Stevie Wonder, who certainly had superior technology to hand. There are still plenty of VL-Tones around, and most of them still work. Dr Joe Paradiso of MIT has incorporated a VL-Tone into his vast modular synth.

Last week, one Music Thing spotted this VL-Tone Possessed by Satan for sale on eBay ? it went for $51. You can usually pick up a regular non-possessed version for under $20, but a mint condition model with the original leatherette case went for ?56 ( $101) in Britain last week. Just don?t let anyone tell you they?re ?rare??