This is Medeli, a Chinese company that appears to be the genuine
manufacturer of many no-name keyboards (including Fujitone and the
mysterious brandless "MC" series instruments).
This is the Chinese manufacturer of the infamous Yongmei and
Miles
toy keyboards - the undoubtedly worst keyboards of the world (see here
and here). Nowadays Yongmei makes beside
these horrible yelling squeakboxes even professional MIDI keyboards with
LCD and 61 velocity sensitive fullsize keys, but I have not heard any of
these highend models yet. (Possibly they contain Medeli
hardware. Yongmei proudly adverts them to employ a French PCM sound source.)
Their cheaper modern fullsize keyboards seem to be based on similar hardware
like fullsize Sankai instruments (like this),
but many of these models (see here)
still have such severe flaws that they are almost unplayable; mine stank
new unbearably of chemicals and were designed to fraud customers by showing
far more (identical sounding) sounds and rhythms than they actually have.
The newer toy keyboards (see here) of
Yongmei seem to be based on My Music Center
sound hardware. According to their company description ("about us"), the
genuine name of their keyboard factory subsidiary seems to be Meisheng,
which uses only imported ICs and makes no own one.
Funny is that there is even a voting on their site to rate the quality
of their keyboard models, thus when you feel hoaxed by them, don't hesitate
to set your checkmark accordingly. (But I don't know if they anyway cheat
with their rating, since in reality the quality of many Yongmei keyboards
is so ridiculously lousy that it is hard to believe that these got a majority
of positive votes at all.)
This is another manufacturer of bizarre Chinese toy tablehooters (MQ-,
QM-). Many of them are designed like shrunken fullsize non-toy instruments,
so some even have 61 mini keys, LCD or fake USB port (only MP3 player for
songs on USB stick?) or disco lights in the speakers. Unfortunately the
build quality is as atrocious as Yongmei, so e.g. omitted matrix
diodes make polyphonic play impossible. Early models were mains operated
with deadly dangerously wired flimsy switching power supply.
This Chinese manufacturer builds the most noble and stylish looking
toy instruments I ever saw (see Cyber Keyboard,
Super
Jam). Especially they make very impressive toy DJ and tekkno consoles
(see e.g. Mix Evolution,
AIR-Dance
Mixer); despite also their toys have some flaws, Potex seems to
be yet the only toy company with the right feeling for the sound and estheticism
of the tekkno environment. (Other companies take a plain ordinary toy keyboard
with waltz, tango, rhumba, some animal voices and 10 establishment child
songs, add a few comic stickers and 4 drumpads with short scratch and drumloop
samples to it and call the entire thing something ridiculous like 'My Great
DJ Mega Disco Hip-Hop 37-Keys Synthesizer'. Things like that make young
tekkno fans rather feel fooled and deterred than making such a tablehooter
more appealing to them.)
This Taiwanese company is apparently the hidden creator behind many
no-name single chip keyboard CPUs, including some of the most exciting
mini keyboard LSI with multipulse squarewave and great POKEY-style blip
percussion (like
Hing Hon EK-001,
Creatoy
and My Music Center variants).
Also many modern Yongmei grade COB chips (e.g. 100 preset sounds
+ LED display etc.) seem to be their creation. With single chip mini and
toy keyboards Holtek was in late 1990th at least among the big 3 next after
Casio
and Yamaha (in sold units count likely even higher).
Here you can download the manuals for most Yamaha keyboards and synthesizers
(as PDF files). If you are missing a manual or plan to buy a used Yamaha
keyboard and want to know its exact features, then this is the best information
source for you.
At this import company site (in former times "Asian Sources") you can
find many pictures of current Chinese music keyboards, electronic sound
toys and the like.
Also here you can find plenty of wholesalers of Chinese plastic toys,
toy keyboards and other obscure cheap tablehooters. Enter e.g. "electronic
organ" into their search engine to see them.
In comparison to average flea markets you can not imagine how easy
it is to find here all kinds of strange no-name and beginners keyboards
and sound toys as well from the great classic era as also in brand new
for very reasonable prices. (To bid at this internet auction service, you
only need to sign up at a web form and within 2 days you will receive a
letter with a password - that's all.)
This website has detailed info about inner working and modification
of early Casio keyboards, including DAC improvement, the data format
to communicate with the D931 sound IC, matrix eastereggs etc. Unfortunately
the main text (a booklet scan "Modifying the Casiotone Instruments"
from 1981) is a 31MB huge PDF.
This article from the ancient home computer magazine "Your Spectrum"
(Issue 4, June 1984) explains how to connect a Sinclair ZX Spectrum
home computer with the barcode reader input of a Casio VL-5. There
is even a BASIC program and many technical details about the data format
of the Casio barcode song books. Instruments those employ these
barcode musics include the Casio VL-5,
Casio
MT-70 and Casiotone 701.
Eduard Cipots is a Latvian musician and electronics engineer, who did
detailed research about the inner working of digital home keyboards (particularly
Yamaha,
but also Russian synths and cheap Chinese tablehooters), including ROM
dumps and even chemical dismantling of ICs. Unfortunately his website has
not much details, but you may e-mail him if you need technical help.
Here you find info about EPROMs, ROMs and how to extract their data.
Although this website is about arcade machine collecting, the basics are
the same with music keyboards.
This article by Sergei P. Skorobogatov about methods of chip hacking
goes far beyond average circuit-bending, although it partly employs similar
means. While it discusses mainly security improvement for serious things
like smart card chips, it is full of piracy paranoia and intellectual property
propaganda. Even the HTML background is pink to cloud your mind with that
brainwash ( =>adjust your browser colours to stay sane).
regard: Extracting abandonware ROM code from cyberage artifacts
is not crime! Because of bitrot it is absolutely necessary for culture
preservation (also see here).
This is the programmer's website of the famous MAME arcade emulator.
Arcade game machines contained a huge variety of different IC types, thus
if you search for obsolete IC info or want to emulate historical digital
hardware, this is a main place to check first.
This artist is claimed to be the "father" of circuit- bending. You
can find much of circuit- bending info there, although my understanding
of it partly differs from his one. Caution: This site tends to load slow
and is not text- navigable because its main page consists of a huge menu
made from lots of useless picture tile ornaments.
This great site is about systematic redesigns of sound toys and home
keyboards into quite professional synthesizers. Unlike average circuit-bending
this often involves upgrades with additional sound forming assemblies like
VCF, VCA, envelope circuits, reverb units or microcontrollers. Also wiring
plans and DIY schematics of the reverse-engineered hardware can be found
here.
On this pocket calculator history site you can find lots of technical
info and circuit bending links about the famous Texas Instruments
speech synthesizer sound toys (like e.g. Speak'n'Spell).
This is an Australian music band that uses many circuit- bend home
keyboards and also does own hardware research on these. (Originally I only
got this e-mail address instead
of weblink.)
This is a collector's site about classic electronic toy keyboards.
Unlike my collection it is mainly centered on 1970th monophonic beep tone
keyboards, but you can also find some freaky toy synthesizers shown there.
Here was much info about the the monophonic tube synth keyboard Clavioline
and its variants. But this website seems to be dead now and even excluded
from the webarchive. I hope it will somewhen come back.
This historical article contains a lot of info why the piano (and its
keyboard layout) became what it is, including a lot of technical details
and critics on the acoustic piano and many early tablehooters attempting
to imitate it.
WARNING! This appliance fills mustard into the piano
- for emergency-use only!
If you want to understand the establishment's shiny grand piano myth
and why 1960th and 70th artists decided to consider pianos their favourite
hate object and smashed and chainsawed them to pieces in stage happenings,
then this constitutes basically a standard work about the culture historical
backgrounds.
This is a great site about repairing and collecting fretless zithers.
Although they are not electronic, it is fascinating to see here the first
ancestors of automatic chord and accompaniment features (see "gizmo zithers"
section). A century ago zithers were as widespread as nowadays home keyboards,
and the industry invented here a similar incredible variety of different
instruments of partly poor concepts and quality, thus they can be well
regarded as predecessors of the modern tablehooters. (Also the HTML code
of this website is antique and even older than mine. So it should display
well in any Mosaic or Lynx browser or your favourite Amiga.)
This is another site about the fretless zithers industry of the 19th
century, including old ads with ridiculous exaggerations and lies (which
reminds a lot to Yongmei transistor
tooters - isn't it?!). Unfortunately the original PDF abstract seems
to be gone.
Youtube:
music keyboard, synth & sound chip history [playlist]
early electronic instruments. Keyboards & sound toys, retro gadgets
with speech synth & sound chips (mainly 1980 to 2000) and their hardware.
Here are also some mechanical music things as their ancestors.
