Intersound
- Guitar Star - Rhythm Guitar MT-7112 (lousy toy
keytar with great POKEY rhythm)
This guitar style toy tablehooter made in Philippines is a rather lousy
variant of the great
Creatoy keyboard.
Unfortunately it has only 5 instead of 8 POKEY rhythm, the volume control
doesn't work and the main voice is a plain squarewave music box timbre
and barely usable.
After reset or power on, the monophonic main voice always turns off
the keyboard after playing 48 notes, because the sequencer memory runs
full. You have to press "replay" (which starts the recorded sequence) to
enable the keyboard again (which now won't stop after 48 notes unless you
delete the sequence with reset). With my specimen the main voice was way
too quiet and the envelope too short. The rhythm otherwise always roars
at full volume, independent from the volume setting. Nice is that like
with Casio VL-1 you can modulate
the speaker sound with a hand, however the limited timbre selection makes
it only interesting with rhythm.
This keyboard was also released as Crown - Rhythm Guitar MT-7112
(shown on box photo). The general behaviour strongly resembles the Creatoy
keyboard, thus I only explain here the differences.
different main features:
-
25 mini keys (3 are fake, only 22 used for main voice play)
-
only 1 monophonic main voice sound (plain squarewave musicbox)
-
only 5 OBS preset rhythms {rhumba, 4 beat, swing, waltz, rock}
-
main voice volume knob (truncates envelope when low, does not change rhythm
volume)
-
tempo +/- buttons (16 steps)
-
keyboard sound and rhythm are generated by 2 separate COB chips; all with
analogue capacitor envelopes. POKEY rhythm corresponds to Creatoy
keyboard.
-
primitive sequencer (record/ playback of 48 notes)
-
only 1 demo ("Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", monophonic without rhythm)
-
microphone jack
modifications:
-
330 Ohm resistor added to fix main voice volume.
notes:
The box shows a Crown version of this keyboard, which has the "demo"
function labelled on the 3rd instead of 2nd key. The headphone headset
that came with it is fake; only its microphone works. The fake level meter
imitation on the case resembles cheap late 1980th boomboxes; there is a
row of holes behind, thus possibly also a variant with genuine LEDs was
made. The main voice of my MT-7112 was way too quiet and the music
box envelope too short. I fixed this by soldering a 330 Ohm resistor parallel
to the diode in the middle of the amp PCB. (But this causes a popping attack
noise at low volume setting. Perhaps replacing the silicon diode with a
germanium one would fix this properly.)
Apparently a variant with red rectangular case (no keytar), 29 mini
keys and all 8 OBS preset rhythms was released by Crown as Crowntone
MT-100 (seen on eBay).
| removal
of these screws voids warranty... |
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