monophonic analogue transistor tablehooter "toot... toooot... What the *beep* is that?"

In 1990th, transistor tooters formed the acme of inexpensive Asian keyboard development. Yes, the ACME.

We now proudly present - the likely world worst keyboard of all times!... ???
 

This thing was initially rather a fraudulent prop than a serious keyboard instrument, and the botched mechanical construction with its cable mess looks very much like assembled in a Chinese concentration camp, therefore don't buy a new one of these unless you really know what you are doing and that you still want it. If any instrument really deserves the term "tablehooter", then this loudly tooting plastic mock-up.

These drumpads are fake and only beep.

Here you can see the extremely wacky keys of this thing.

The box shows a different variant with black case.

!

On the package box of this instrument is a picture of a black case version with the model name "SUNNY". A black case variant of this instrument was also released as MS-7A and MS-8A by Yongmei (brand label was too blurred, but seen on the Yongmei site).

Here comes a dose of finest prose, found on the box - what it means... Who knows?!
 

main features:

• flimsy golden metallic, semi-transparent plastic case in the style of a modern stereo keyboard (but with only one speaker inside); it has a white logo with camel and pyramids (blatantly copied  from "Camel" cigarette packages).
• very flimsy 44 mid size keys (with a row of likely hand- bent and soldered very crude tin leaf switches and resistors underneath).
• transistorized monophonic sawtooth(?) tone generator (without envelope) on a 1970th style analogue PCB.
• switch for 2 timbres (pitch changes slightly when switching it)
• switch for 2 volume settings (terribly loud, and louder!)
• vibrato switch.
• 12(?) demo melodies monophonic melody IC "A7" (squarewave without envelope) that sounds worse(!) than average electronic melody greeting cards.
• mock up of a control panel with lots of alphabetic labelled buttons those look like sound/ rhythm stuff or similar, but they are all wired parallel and just select the next demo melody from the melody chip.
• a "play/store" switch switches between keyboard play and demos.
• 3 fake drumpad button mock ups those only play keyboard notes
• microphone jack
• power supply jack originally wired parallel(!) to the battery compartment =>batteries may EXPLODE when using an AC adapter without removing them.

modifications:

• AC adapter jack rewired correctly: polarity protection diodes and voltage regulator added.
• sound output cinch jack added.
• real volume control pot added.
• 3 sound manipulation pots added; they change pitch and can make some bizarre, buzzy, partly almost voice- like wah- wah noises when turned during the play of notes.
• "play/ store" switch re-wired to enable the melody IC to play simultaneously with the keyboard.
• semi-transparent case upgraded with a green LED below the keys and an orange one under the camel logo. Modified pictures from "Camel" lung torpedo box added to the rear side and painted with the logo "MUTANT CAMEL".

These are the knobs I added.

notes:

Unfortunately the keys of my "Mutant Camel" are very flimsy (and might easily crack off when accidentally bent upwards), their leaf contacts often bend or tangle with cables and also the control panel switches may fail by oxidation because they scratch around on bare copper PCB traces (see Golden Camel-11AB photos), though I would not describe it as anything remotely "stage proof".

Here you see how transparent the flimsy plastic is.

circuit bending details Beside the monophonic demo melody IC there is absolutely nothing digital in such a transistor tooter. The circuitry is best to compare with a Stylophone and technically outdated since 1980. The flimsy plastic is almost yoghurt cup grade, thus strictly avoid any excessive force. Slide switches scratch on copper traces. The mainboard contains 0 ICs. Rusty tin can contacts hit resistors... My key LED Fake buttons wired parallel triggering this melody chip. The jacks of mayhem... modifications: Most important: smoking kills! Add diodes to avoid fire! These are some crude hand drawn schematics of the Golden Camel-7A and my modification. They may be inaccurate or partly even wrong, but this is all I have about it. The red components were added by me. My timbre filters Install resistors to save ears. Audio out

The case style and control panel layout of the Golden Camel-7A was likely imitated from Bestar MC 3300. A direct successor of the 7A was released as Miles - Golden Camel-11AB, which looks very similar but contains crude digital sound hardware instead. Another 7A variant with rhythm chip (but likely still transistor tooter main voice) was released as EGroovz Composer 1 (silver metallic case, 4 red drumpads, 5 slide switches, made by K-Group Industries, sold in 2005 by Toys'R'Us for 19.95$), which on Amazon.com got the worst destructive mocking critics thanks to its earbleeding loud tone and fragile construction. Other variants of the Golden Camel-7A (usually with less keys) were sold under many different brand names; e.g. a 24 keys variant has the name "Panashiba PS-100" and a 37 keys one "Jia Yin JY-3712A" and there are many others. Keyboards of this analogue tooting transistor hardware class can be recognized without hearing them by their lots of buttons labelled with alphabet letters and especially a "play/ store" slide switch; often there are also other slide switches labelled with alphabet letters. Also 3.5 mm microphone/ AC- adapter jacks with a strange (usually yellow) plastic rim are a typical feature.

The genuine manufacturer of all these wacky tablehooters seems to be the obscure Chinese company Yongmei (see here for their internet site); according to their proudly boasting "about us" page, their keyboard factory subsidiary is Meisheng, which uses only imported ICs and makes no own ones. The model names of their instruments often begin with "YM-" (=Yongmei), "MS-" (= Miles, MeiKe, MeiSheng) or "JY-" (=Jia Yin), but there are also others.  A more complete list is here.
 

Here are some eBay photos of other keyboards in the Yongmei transistor tooter hardware class. (I don't own these.) As usual, colours and "brand" names of all these case variants vary a lot. (I guess in this case the manufacturers know well why to change their name regularly - there must be an awful lot of angry customers around now those certainly never want to buy such a tablehooter again nor will recommend anybody else again to buy them...) Also the demo melody chips seem to vary.  This little squeaker is sold in many toy stores and there is also an even shorter variant. The button layout can vary but the case shape stays the same.  A fraud on eBay sold me a "Shining Star - Little Angel HD-2908" (layout like above) with false claims it had rhythm etc. In truth it beeps only with 1 timbre and the rightmost 4 switches are even dummies and do nothing at all. This is called SK-3713E... This thing is labelled Kamichi; I believe to remember that the Panashiba PS-100 looked similar. This smaller 44 midsize keys variant of the big Kamichi was also released under the Golden Camel label. A version with blue and yellow buttons came out as "ITEM NO. 10A". This is the most widespread transistor tooter version. It was released e.g. as Yongmei YM-322B, Miles XH-322B (e.g. sold by Ostoy), Jia Yin JY-322B and Super-TS-3000, and there are still zillions of them new on eBay - some even badly overpriced. The Miles - 370D tooter looks almost like a "real" keyboard. ...and this is a JY-2100; at eBay someone tried to sell this noble looking silver plastic hoax for the insane moon price of 69€. This is the infamous EGroovz Composer 1, as it was once sold by Toys'R'Us (old Amazon photos - watch the shattered corner!). Apparently it has a rhythm IC.

This one is the definitely most bizarre and top of the line model of the Yongmei transistor tooter hardware class (see above), because this huge monophonic tablehooter has indeed 54 fullsize keys, a flashing light bulb, 4 OBS rhythms and even a real rhythm tempo slider (controls simply the rhythm chip clock rate) despite its main voice can only produce a very loud monophonic beep with vibrato. Additionally it contains a chip with 4 sample based preset rhythms. The instrument was released by Kamichi (not "Kamico" as I thought first) and another one was named XH-210 (both seen on eBay), but my specimen is missing the box and has no brand label at all.

I saw this thing first in 1990th on a flea market in Bremen; it had the typical alphabet buttons and 5 circularly arranged red buttons with rhythm names on them, but  I didn't ask for the price at that time, since I was carrying already much other stuff and my den stands already plenty full of other keyboards and videogames. Later someone demanded 10€ (too much) for such a thing. Years later I finally bought mine on a flea market; it was in very bad condition with many scratches, one speaker loose, several key hooks and a jack broken and some cables torn off, but it costed only 1.50€. I am still not sure if I have re-soldered all cables correctly back into place, because the previous owner had connected at least the "play/ store" switch wires wrongly (which disabled the melody chip).

main features:

• big black plastic case with 2 speakers (wired parallel, not stereo)
• 54 whacky fullsize keys (with a row of likely hand- bent and soldered crude brass(?) leaf switches and resistors underneath).
• switch for 2 volume settings (terribly loud, and louder!)
• 7 timbres selectable through 3 "tone" switches (those mix 3 differently filtered versions of the waveform together)
• 4 OBS preset rhythms (disco, swing= tango, chacha, rumba); 1 button is a doublet
• 4 drumpad functions (through rhythm select buttons when rhythm is off)
• tempo slider (simply controls rhythm IC clock speed)
• 8 demo melodies on monophonic melody IC "AI 71" (squarewave without envelope) that sounds worse (!) than average electronic melody greeting cards.
• mock up of a control panel ("computer select") with lots of alphabetic labelled buttons those look like sound/ rhythm stuff or similar, but they are all wired parallel and just select the next demo melody from the melody chip.
• a "play/ store" switch switches between keyboard play and demos
• transistorized monophonic sawtooth(?) tone generator (without envelope) on a 1970th style analogue PCB; vibrato can not be turned off.
• separate small COB rhythm IC module "HGC5".
• light bulb lamp (lights up during loud sounds)
• battery compartment for 6 big C size batteries
• microphone jack
• power supply jack originally wired parallel(!) to the battery compartment =>batteries may EXPLODE when using an AC adapter without removing them.

This is an eBay picture. My specimen has different button colours and lacks the original box and microphone.

The "computer select"  keypad is as fake as on Golden Camel-7A.

eastereggs:

• The "tone" switches slowly fade the timbre and volume and thus provide a crude envelope effect when switched while notes are played. Particularly switching from (0,1,0) to (0,0,1) mutes the sound and makes it fade louder for 1 second. With all 3 switches off (i.e. down) no sound is played. The switch settings also modify the rhythm timbre in a similar way.

modifications:

• AC adapter jack replaced and re-wired correctly
• real volume control pot added (which also distorts at low volume)
• tempo potentiometer range extended
• (I didn't upgrade this instrument more because I already own  my Mutant Camel, but since it is analogue, it can be certainly modified similarly.)

notes:

This instrument has 4 sample based rhythms, those select buttons also work as drumpads when no rhythm is played. 1 of the 5 rhythm select buttons is fake (wired parallel with another), thus there are only 4 rhythms and they also have no similarity with the button labels. I therefore have written down the 4 real rhythm patterns here:
 

button label	drumpad sound	real rhythm pattern
disco	cymbal [c]	[b-sss-s-b-b-t-t-]
swing, tango	snare [s]	[b-b-s-b-] (rock)
chacha	tom [t]	[c--cc---] (swing made from cymbal only)
rumba	base [b]	[b---b---b---bsss] (4beat with drumroll, majestic march?)

circuit bending details The electronics of the Kamichi XH-210 is the same horrible cable mess with unreliable 1970th toy style metal spring switches like the Golden Camel-7A; there are multiple small and tiny PCBs in it and the rhythm is generated by a tiny COB chip module. Unlike in 7A, the punched out keyboard leaf spring component is here gold(???) or brass plated. Again no ICs on the mainboard, and a fake "computer select" keypad triggers the melody cpu. I replaced the 2 step volume switch with a 100 kOhm potentiometer (open end connected through 100µF cap against GND). The original switch is bridged with a 20 kOhm resistor on the PCB, which needs to be removed for this. (At low volume the sound distorts a bit with these components. The now unused switch can be certainly re-wired to turn off vibrato). rhythm CPU This is the rhythm cpu, the rhythm tempo slide pot and flashing incan lamp. The 4 rhythms of this instrument are identical with the ones of the "Dancing Skull" sound toy (a walking white plastic skull with green flashing LED eyes, made in China by Goldlok), but not with with the similar chip of my Golden Camel-11AB. Due to this abused toy chip has no tempo control, the manufacturer wired the tempo pot the classic circuit bender's way. My tempo preset trimmer. The clock input of the chip is AC controlled (HF at the potentiometer) and it can be overclocked until the rhythm turns into a continuous beep (by replacing the 75 kOhm resistor in the clock line with 1 kOhm and removing the 100 kOhm resistor between wiper and "+" pot end and pulling the "-" pot end through a 220k preset trimmer against the +3Vs of the IC). But at least with my specimen the rhythm stops when underclocked too much. The rhythm CPU has 2 unused pins (possibly output for LED flash effects).

Someone e-mailed me that another transistor tooter with the same rhythm chip was the Yongmei YM-398B (37 keys, grey case?, mains operated).

transition Yongmei keyboards

Golden Camel-11AB MeiKe MK-320B Yongmei MS-110A, MS-210B

These "transition Yongmeis" were produced only for a very short time and thus are the rarest of all Yongmei keyboards (including e.g. Golden Camel-11AB, Yongmei MS-110A, Yongmei MS-210B, MeiKe MK-320B, Yongmei MS-200 and Yongmei YM-378D). But also the larger transistor tooters have become rare, since by fragility and ear tormenting loud tooting they will certainly not survive parental rage attacks and end smashed in trashcans as quickly as they were botched together (a fate that also decimated the legions of wacky late 1980th boomboxes). Nowadays Yongmei makes beside horrible yelling toy squeakboxes even professional MIDI keyboards with LCD and 61 velocity sensitive fullsize keys, but I have not heard any of these yet. (Possibly they contain Medeli hardware.) On eBay I also saw many semi- professional Yongmei sound bank keyboards with fullsize keys; by their case design they are likely made by the same manufacturer like the Sankai keyboards (see here). But at least the ones I bought in the noughties were still ridiculously bad and full of flaws (see e.g. Yongmei DL-2300, YM-3300, YM-6700).
 

removal of these screws voids warranty...
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