This little bugger would be one of the most familiar casios, it’s charm comes from the fact it was part of the first generation of Casios in the 1990’s that were on the whole, crap.

With the SA-1 the Casio Corporation obviously thought, let’s see how much we cram into one chip. There is nothing to this Casio, literally one chip for everything and a couple of other components and an amplifier chip. That’s it!

So for circuit bending trendoid glitchstars the SA-1 is quite useless. Also because of having to cram so much into the chip it is a noisy thing - as in a lo res noise from the sounds themselves, there is no fix for the hiss. I had one sound guy almost ban it from stage when I lent mine top the lovely Toxic Lipstick gals. ‘Theres a hiss! Theres a hiss! It must be an earth hum!’, ‘er, no man that’s just how the SA-1 sounds’.

If it is so crap why is it always in my onstage setup, why is it the only keyboard the greatest computer disco band in the universe, Desert Planet, use live and why would Toxic Lipstick borrow it?

Number two reason, portability - nothing comes close to size and range of of sounds ratio, especially if you saw off all the superfluous plastic and the speaker. Number one reason:
The sounds!

It is a ‘tone bank’ Casio, that is it has 99 PCM sounds. Some very great basses, stupendously fab sound effects (as used by the band Aavikko to great affect), the awesome ‘metal lead’ sound, organs to die for et cetera et cetera. Basically, it drags General Midi behind the bike shed and smears dog poo into his school jumper.

And as for the drums: very punchy, very nice, very ROCK. For a good demo of what the SA-1 really can sound like check out Rauberhohle’s song ‘Casio Destroy Toy’, which you can download from her site. This surely is the most kick arse song about Casio keyboards EVER, and most of it is the SA-11 - a larger version of the SA-1.

It also has preset riffs, like Funky (which it is) and Jungle (Martin Denny eat your heart out). These riffs are in a fixed key and even if you don’t find them useful they are damn entertaining.

Which brings me to the singular, most coolest thing about the SA-1. The demo tune. Wait for it. Waaaiit for it. Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go by WHAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dead set.

Now this is interesting because the YAMAHA SHS-10 has Wham!s ‘Last Christmas’ as a demo. The SHS-10 pre-dates the SA-1, making this the ONLY occasion that yamaha was the innovator and casio the imitator in the world of home keyboards.

The inclusion of a Wham! song does bring about mixed feelings, I recently saw all the Wham! filmclips and one can tell even there that dear George, and the other guy who everyone forgets about, (sorry Andrew, we love you too!), knew they were being thoroughly shafted by the record company. Of course some of this shafting would have been the licensing of their hits to, what was perceived then, as extremely uncool home keyboard companies.

I have a suspicion I would have lost a few readers by now with equating Wham! with excellence. The fact though is they could write a damn catchy pop tune, hit the demo on the SA-1 and you will know what I mean, which is quite an accomplishment. As for George Michael - well he has ‘it’, in buckets - the magnetism and skill as a live perfomer he has is astounding. He was Ricky Martin before Ricky Martin was. Wham!s ethos was always about putting on a fun, good live show for the fans. Respect.

Back to the SA-1. The SA-1 is not to be confused with the SA-9 which is identical in appearance and soundset. Three things set them apart, the SA-1 was manufactured in Japan, SA-9 in Taiwan, the SA-1 has an output socket, the SA-9 not PLUS the SA-9 does NOT have Wake Me Up Before You Go Go as a demo tune.

TableHooters has an excellent very indepth technical page about the SA-1 if anyone wants to know more.