This seemingly worthless synth/calculator hybrid weighing in at under a pound has somehow found fame and fortune despite looking like a kid's toy. Its ultra cheesy sounds have been discovered and immortalized in the hit songs of such artists as Trio for "Da Da Da" and White Town. The Casio VL-1 or VL-Tone as it's also called has 29 little calculator-type button keys, five preset and one user memory patches, built-in rhythm machine (waltz, swing, rock, samba, etc.) and a 100-note sequencer. There is no chance at any external or MIDI control and there are no filters or effects. There is an LFO with vibrato and tremolo effects and an ADSR envelope.

The tinny monophonic blips and beeps that come out of the VL-1 provide a childishly funny accent to your music, if you're into that sort of thing. The VL-1 is analog, it's tiny, it has a built-in speaker and a useless built-in calculator. The synth itself is quite small, light-weight and portable when running on batteries. The keys are unreliable and cheap soft buttons with absolutely no natural feel, response, aftertouch or velocity. The VL-1 was succeeded by the VL-10 (same spec, smaller case) and VL-5 (4-note polyphonic version with a useless bar-code reader). Strangely, the simple cheesy sounds of the VL-Tone have been used by Apollo 440, Devo, the Talking Heads, the Cars, Dee-Lite, Sting, Stevie Wonder, Vince Clarke, Beastie Boys, The Human League, Trio, White Town, and Bill Nelson.

Orlando56

September 3, 2011 @ 5:35 pm

I had one of these in the 80s, played it once at a high school show on top of a grand piano, using the two button sequencer to play my riff. Some girls made fun of me afterwards... Little did they know the rockstar I'd go on to become :-) Necessity was the mother of invention in those impoverished days. There was a patch called "ADSR" that I couldn't access reliably -- my first introduction to synthesis concepts. I still have it, but it doesn't work anymore. One thing that always seemed weird to me was the in the drum patterns, the "bass" drum was higher-pitched than the snare!

chinese music

July 7, 2011 @ 10:38 am

I made a song with the VL-1 and the Apple II alphasyntauri (first softsynth) in 1985
http://www.icompositions.com/music/song.php?sid=33939

parallax

April 25, 2011 @ 9:58 pm

This little guy actually sounds pretty cool with some reverb on it!

The Ghoul

April 11, 2011 @ 8:48 am

Just got one of these from ebay.. mint condition in the box with everything...

The programmable section is quite good in an uber lo-fi way once you get your head around it..

My industrial metal act just got a touch of retro cool!!

Pete

February 9, 2011 @ 4:29 pm

i have an emulator for one of these that i use in fruity loops. sounds great combined with a minimoog background =]

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