Casio PT-80- owned from 2001? to present, bought for $18.50 (I think)
The PT-80 is a nice little monophonic keyboard with an interesting color combination (white with green, blue, pink, and yellow buttons), along the same lines as the Casio VL-1. It has a bad-feeling 32-key keyboard, 12 rhythms, 8 tones, chord buttons, and a ROM cartridge slot.
The rhythms are typical early 80's Casio patterns. Pressing the button of a rhythm which is already playing will play a fill pattern. The drum sounds consist of filtered square waves and white noise. The instrumental sounds seem to be simple digital waves with a little bit of filtering. The envelopes are quite rough and seem to be 3 bits. The violin, flute, trumpet, and celesta sounds are my favorite. There are also chord buttons on the left side, with buttons underneath to select minor, 7th, and minor 7th chords (major is default). This is a nice idea but the buttons are kind of hard to press decently. The chords are very nice sounding filtered square waves. They sound great through a chorus effect. When the chords are pressed while a rhythm is playing, it makes this sort of bass-and-chord auto accompanyment which can be somewhat annoying.
There's also a ROM slot. Each card contains 4 songs- traditional songs, 80's pop songs, whatever. They can be played in a few different modes, using the LEDs above the keys as a guide. I don't find them to be particularly interesting.
I haven't really looked into it much, but as far as I can tell, the raw sounds come off of one chip and go through a bit of filtering and modification on the other circuit board. It's possible to change the sound a bit by messing with the circuits, but I haven't fully figured this out yet. There's a trimpot inside for tuning, which changes the tempo of everything, the tuning of the drums, etc. Other than that, I don't see a lot of potential for modification.
It's a pretty decent little keyboard with some nice sounds, but the PT-30 is more interesting (more chord selections, more sounds, sequencer, no ROM slot).
pictures:
sounds:
PT-80- cheesy demo.
There's a more thorough review at the WarrantyVoid Tablehooter collection: Casio PT-80, MT-18
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