My Beloved Casio

I've been wire bending my casio sk-1 ever since I got for !THREE DOLLARS! at the thread shed (a consignment store) in my hometown about 3 years ago. The thing is a beast. Even without breaking it open you can sample, do simple synthesis, and midi sequence with the little plastic thing. Once you do break it open its just a god damn gold mine. Touching the thing wont give you much more then an electrical buzz but once your do some carefull connecting you an aligator clip or some leads you can really get some good sounds. From messing around with it a little over the years and especially in class I've learned alot about it. The best way to manipulate the sounds or drum beats that it can produce is to mess with the big chips (larger versions of the ones we use in class) located all the way to the right. When you connect the very first one to any of the others it changes the sound or beat in an extremely managable way. Often it won't throw it out of pitch or time signature with only one connection. This multiplies the kind of sounds you can make on the thing by about a million. Just last night I only used one alligator clip connection to make a synth that had two pitches that played in a rhythm everytime I played a key. Pressing another key would produce another two tones in the same rhythm. The best thing was that you could play a certain sequence of keys to actually make a traditional melody that was made more complicated by the switching pitches. I added this over some simple hip hop drums to make a pretty dirty and slightly sick sounding beat. This is one of the best things about the casio, you can definently get the thing to scream noise, but you can also manage it well to keep things more traditionaly musical. As far as chaos goes you can connect one of the headphone output circuts into a circut comming from the key's that will make everything distort and fall out of pitch and time. This is beautiful, you can press the keys and they won't listen at all but rather will play random screaming noises. You play drum beats while this connection is on and the individual drum sounds will play at completely random times and as you add more connections on the chips as before more and more unique sounds will find their way into the drum pattern. Lastly you can minipulate the speed of this pattern by simply turning screw controllers on the keyboard's clocks. It has one for both large speed/pitch adjustment and small tweaking.