TableHooters - my instrument hacks and collection

to all eBay sellers: (terms of use) This site is protected by copyright law. It is illegal to treat any parts of this site as your own work, to sell copies of them for profit or to include them into professional commercial advertisements. Doing so will need my explicit written permission. This is allowed :

You can retrieve info about musical instruments from this site to sell your own instruments. But so far you include any quoted text parts or pictures from here into an announce on eBay or elsewhere, you must clearly mark the quoted parts as taken from CYBERYOGI =CO=Windler's keyboard site "WarrantyVoid" and include a link to it where possible. This is forbidden :

It is forbidden to use any parts of this site in fraudulent or misleading ways. Especially you must not abuse pictures or descriptions of my modified instruments to sell unmodified ones without clearly explaining that your offered specimen is not modified.

Main purpose of my collection is to explore the domain of the unheard. But I also want to clear up with this site about the bizarre world of tablehooters, because unlike with expensive synthesizers and most professional instruments, the world of small home keyboards and electronic sound toys was yet still a blind spot of the internet since yet nobody else had ever systematically analyzed and catalogued which instruments exist, which sounds they make and how they technically function. E.g. it is still not commonly known that many old instrument employ digital squarewave sound generators those behaviour and timbre differs significantly (see here) from what standard theories of analogue synthesizers tell about square wave tones.

With my collection I am not interested in collecting multiple case variants of technically identical instruments, nor need mine to be in perfect mint condition. I also do not collect very expensive and professional things (like Roland TB303 or Minimoog) - not only by financial reasons but also because things with high collectors prices have already become well known establishment stuff while I want to explore and document particularly the unknown electronic instruments those have no huge collectors scene yet and thus don't appear in every common pop song today - and this despite many of them have great potential to set the sound for future musics.

note: I am not one of these wealthy snobs with big money. Despite my fairly large collection I neither own nor pay much money for my instruments (thus do not attempt to sell expensive things to me). All these instruments were gathered over years; monthly I spend not more money than other people for new CDs or videogames (perhaps roughly about 40..60€), and because I neither waste money for drugs (alc, tobacco, whatever) nor own a brain fryer (mobile phone) nor a petrol stinker (automobile), the limit of my keyboard collection is rather space than money. I am mainly watching eBay for forgotten, poorly described or broken items, thus often the postage is higher than the sales price. Only for very few items (mainly synthesizers) I paid about 50€, while most keyboards went far below 20€ and some I even got for 1€ by the lack of other bidders.

Nowadays I think that I have almost completed the task of collecting and documenting one specimen of every existing hardware class of classic small and midsize keyboards. Although I also buy cheap modern sound toys and beginners keyboards when they are interesting, as well their variety of unique sounds as the speed of innovation has strongly decreased, thus the collection will certainly grow much slower in future. (I e.g. don't even try to collect the hundreds of very similar My Music Center hardware variants, because most of them only differ in the selection of demo melodies and their very similar preset sounds.)



In the following texts "keys" always mean piano keys; the ones on the control panel I call "buttons". Functions those can always be selected by a single button press (important for live performance of tekkno etc.) are marked with "OBS" (one button select). So far not mentioned otherwise, the digital part of all these instruments is based on a single chip (here often called "CPU") and there are neither MIDI nor velocity sensitive keys. With "shift- register noise" I mean a shift- register feedback circuit (a pseudo random number generator which outputs a more or less long, but repeating bit sequence to approximate white noise). I call an instrument "digital" when sound generation and envelopes are digital, i.e. no envelope capacitors and no controllable analogue filters are present. I call it "analogue" when it contains any mainly analoguely generated or significantly this way post- processed (e.g. differently filtered) main voice sounds.



legend: = nice and/or unusual sound = very unusual hardware = circuit bent (sound modified) = much circuit bent = extremely circuit bent = constructed by myself

In the following all instruments are sorted by the sound generation technology they mainly use.

music keyboards:

analogue monophonic: These instruments control their oscillator pitch directly by a voltage divider chain of different resistors under their keys. This is the simplest design of an electronic keyboard instrument. Most such instruments employ a squarewave oscillator (multivibrator) and the sound is often post- processed by analogue filters to produce different main voice timbres.

Golden Camel 7A, Kamichi XH-210 (Yongmei, Miles) [ updated 2007-04-12 ]

- absurd tooting tablehooters (with schematics) | general Yongmei info

Jörgensen Clavioline [new 2004-08-27]

- historical tube synth keyboard, great electro bass noises (with repair tips)

analogue full-polyphonic: This is the oldest polyphonic hardware design. These keyboards employ squarewave- like tone generators with frequency dividers to produce as many voices as keys, but have no polyphonic envelope. They also employ analogue filters to produce different main voice timbres.

Antonelli - Star 2379 [updated 2005-04-26]

- organ keyboard with unusual polyphonic accompaniment, analogue rhythm

Jörgensen Electronic - Tuttivox [updated 2004-08-27]

- antique portable tube organ

Ramasio 892 [ updated 2007-04-12 ]

- small midsize(!) full polyphonic keyboard, great polyphonic accompaniment

Squarewave means that the timbres are mainly made from the square waveform (with or without envelope), which is the simplest electronic basic waveform (see here). This permits e.g. to re-create the unique electronic sound style known from historical videogames and homecomputers. I call an instrument "squarewave" when the waveform is not only processed internally (which is done in most analogue instruments), but also well audible as characteristic timbre.

analogue squarewave: These squarewave instruments use analogue capacitor envelopes for their main voice, and usually sound warmer than digital squarewave.

analogue filtered squarewave: These squarewave instruments employ different analogue filters for their main voice.

analogue filtered dual squarewave: These instruments synthesize their main voice from 2 layered multipulse squarewaves with different digital envelopes followed by simple analogue filters. (Casio called this principle Consonant- Vowel synthesis.) The results can be very different from average videogame squarewave sounds and permit high quality timbres.

digital squarewave: These instruments make their main voice from a squarewave tone with digital envelope and no analogue filters.

basic waveforms: These instruments employ other basic electronic waveforms (sawtooth, triangular wave, sine wave etc.) to synthesize sounds.

Casio MT-70 [updated 2006-06-07]

- digital dual sine wave sound, key lighting with barcode pen, analogue rhythm

Bontempi ES 3300 [updated 2004-08-27]

- sick yelling digital sound bank, absurdly crappy lo-fi rhythms

Bontempi KS 4600 [new 2004-04-04]

- lousy wannabe sound bank, lo-fi sample percussion

FM: FM is a common digital sound synthesis technology (well known from Yamaha DX7) that produces sounds by digitally multiplying basic waveforms to generate more complex ones. Most FM keyboards (with separate sound chip) can be easily modified into synthesizers (see Fujitone 6A).

natural waveforms: These digital instruments use for the main voice static, extremely short looped waveform "samples" those are modelled after natural instrument timbres (and not just basic waveforms) together with envelopes.

dual natural waveforms: These digital instruments use for the main voice 2 layered natural waveforms.

plain samples: Plain samples means that the instrument per note plays simply a single sample from start to end (with maximum one loop point).

wavetable: With "wavetable" I mean instruments those generate sounds by layering multiple (typically 2) samples together (often with independent envelopes) or those play multiple short (e.g. waveform) sample fragments in sequence to synthesize a sound.

electro-acoustic:

Bontempi B9 [new 2005-04-26]

- chord organ with pressure sensitive keys

Graber Rogg CTX 1000 [new 2005-04-26]

- portable chord organ with nice sound & pressure sensitive keys

Nigam bulbul tarang [updated 2003-02-19]

- string keyboard from India

acoustic:

Baby Piano [new 2004-01-25]

- velocity sensitive toy piano with nice sound and astonishing mechanism

sound toys, drum computers & others:

analogue squarewave:

Bontempi - Disney Band [updated 2006-06-07]

- great POKEY tekkno noises

FM:

Unisynth XG-1 [updated 2004-02-24]

- electronic pseudo- guitar (with repair tips)

dual natural waveforms:

SoundWaves - Graduate Jammer Guitar MG-1530 [updated 2006-06-07]

- toy pseudo- guitar with great accompaniment & blip rhythms

instruments created by me:

Jyotiophon

- optical theremin from 2034

Tekknetion prototype 1

- live performance sampling instrument