It is safe to assume that any casio musical product after 1990 sucks. Except for one. A mid nineties anomoly in the homekeyboard world that is now only spoken about in reverent hushed tones.

Posting about this casio has me concerned, you see I don’t own one and if I did it would be the central part of the CasioNova experience. The mere fact I am now telling the world how utterly cool and rare this casio is makes it more desirable to the *shudder* collectors with jobs who pay top dollar to put another casio under the bed and therefore making it less likely I will have one of my own in my pale sickly claw like hands.

The Casio VA-10

The V in VA should give it away a little - v for ‘voice’, I presume.

The layout is similar to other little casios of the period - along the top on the right is printed the 100 voices of the tone bank, very similar to other PCM casios. There are a couple of extra voices I haven’t seen before which are pretty cool, notably an extra organ that has the characteristic hammond key click. There aren’t any good synth sounds or basses, except for the ‘tuba’ sound which is a great bass.

So the sounds kind of suck - well just look to the left of the listing of sounds and where one would normally see a listing of backing styles in a typical 90’s casio there is a listing of effects - 60 of them! Well not actually sixty discrete effects but sixty combinations of:

small hall
large hall
stadium
disco
metallic room
delay
stereo delay
pitch shifter
dual pitch
ensemble
flanger A+B
chorus
distortion
tremolo
vibrato
heavy vibrato
panning A+B
vocoder

Yep vocoder. For those who don’t know what a vocoder is, it is the effect that makes robots sing as heard on any electro album. A real vocoder combines two audio signals in a way that my puny brain can’t explain - usually a voice from a microphone and a synthesiser to make that robot sing. However you can of course vocode any sound to any other sound - this is what really makes a vocoder a very interesting device to have. I have always dreamed of vocoders for its normal use - it makes us non-singers able to sing, the idea of a CASIO vocoder - hoo boy! Is this the cheapest coolest vocoder ever?

Nup. It isn’t a vocoder. There is an input for a mic, or anything else you would like to feed into the machine for that matter, but when you select the vocoder effect and play a key the tone you have selected on the casio now follows the envelope of the inputed signal. It is an envelope follower, not a vocoder, which essentially means it can sound like a vocoder but all timbral information in the input signal is lost and if the input is your voice that means your words will be unintelligible. Still quite useful though!

Rather than the ultra cheap vocoder of casio lore the VA-10 is best viewed as the only casio effect unit - now that is cool. Imagine those qualities that make home keyboards great, in an effects unit. What can you effect? Well the 60 combinations include effecting either/and in various combinations the tone bank sounds of the keyboard and the mic input, for example you can put a distortion on the external sound and a delay on the internal. Other combinations involve putting two different effects on the one signal.

Each effect also has a parameter you can adjust, like the rate of the flanger. If you prefer your adjustment to the preset there are 9 additional effect memory slots to save your own patches!

It gets even better: the green button. The green button switches on the pitch sensor. Yep the casio attempts to detect the pitch of the external input and plays the corresponding notes. No shit. Holy shit.
Computationally this is a difficult task, is a wee little casio able to handle it? Yes! It works! Sure you have to be careful about what you feed it and there is a little bit of latency but OMFG this has to be the SINGULARLY best feature on ANY casio I have seen, and I know my casios. THE GREEN BUTTON!

The other effects are also quite good in their own casio way - believe it or not the distortion effect is ok, just as good as distortion on any cheap multi effects pedal. Not a Big Muff by no means but I was shocked to find it useful. All the other effects do what they say with minimum fuss.

So it doesn’t really matter the inbuilt sounds kind of suck - they can be redeemed by the judicious use of inbuilt effects. Sorry, I am getting a bit emotional here, it is hard to convey how awesome this keyboard is, you see the CasioNova parameters are to only play old 80’s casios - with the proviso of running them through effects to achieve maximum rock (which I thought was okay since every Fender Strat player runs their guitar through an effect). With the VA-10 I could effect my casios with a … casio!

I really like the drum sounds on this thing - a very punchy synth kick drum and one of the best snare sounds I have heard, period. The VA-10 has the usual rock, disco, 16 beat etc - not badly programmed either. The neat thing is that the buttons used to change the effect parameters double as triggers for the drum sounds - essential for a casio with such cool sounding drums.

There is a memory function that records the notes you play, not sure for how long - I never reached the end prior to my playing deterioting so badly I had to stop. Underneath the memory controls are three buttons with the heading ‘Harmony Arranger’. I have yet to discover this part of the VA-10, there was too much else to play with - it appears to calculate harmonies from what you have recorded and quantises your recording also.

The VA-10 is your typically sized two and a half octave mini key casio, it is stereo, which many of the effects take advantage of. No autochord functions. Six demo tunes. That is all I have to say except…

I WANT ONE!

(big big big thankyou to Richard who lent me his VA-10, the only one I have seen in the flesh/plastic, Richard is actually a very good musician who records with the VA-10. Respect. His new tune is awesome and hopefully I will have a link to it soon)

I have the manual to download here. (thanks steve!)

–addendum–
just googled va-10 and tablehooters has done a much overview of it than i have. Go here