Capable of cool beats and analogue sync with Volca or etc.!
I messed with this SK-1 a lot back around 2014. I started by spraying the keyboard that sticky silver color and adding the switches to its right. They have some of the usual odd circuit-bendy effects.
Eventually I discovered, poking around inside, that there were a few points which produced regular pulses in time with the onboard drum beats. I soldered a mess of wires to these, some other points with cool and/or weird effects, and a ground, then took them out to a terminal connector I got off an old game pad with a weird number of pins. The matching chord ran to a tin full of buttons and some outs for sync.
We did some jamming with it years ago involving LSDJ (Gameboy) and Volca stuff, and it worked just fine. The trick, as always, was getting patterns to start at the right time. I haven't used it much, mostly because the drums actually sound pretty bad... along with everything else. Sorry to the people who love SK-1s.
The buttons are gridded so that you could hypothetically remember cool combinations and actually sort of DJ on the thing. The two 1/4" outs supply a regular pulse in time with the Casio's beat- the fast one being twice as quick as the slow. The "sync multiply" doubles each. Really, this is just a switch which shifts the signals- I found three pulse outputs that were multiples of each other. A lot of the buttons are actually really useful, and change the drums up in interesting ways. Most of them mess with the sync signals, but you find ones that don't. There is a lot of havoc with the chord accompaniment, for better or worse. Usually worse...
I messed with this SK-1 a lot back around 2014. I started by spraying the keyboard that sticky silver color and adding the switches to its right. They have some of the usual odd circuit-bendy effects.
Eventually I discovered, poking around inside, that there were a few points which produced regular pulses in time with the onboard drum beats. I soldered a mess of wires to these, some other points with cool and/or weird effects, and a ground, then took them out to a terminal connector I got off an old game pad with a weird number of pins. The matching chord ran to a tin full of buttons and some outs for sync.
We did some jamming with it years ago involving LSDJ (Gameboy) and Volca stuff, and it worked just fine. The trick, as always, was getting patterns to start at the right time. I haven't used it much, mostly because the drums actually sound pretty bad... along with everything else. Sorry to the people who love SK-1s.
The buttons are gridded so that you could hypothetically remember cool combinations and actually sort of DJ on the thing. The two 1/4" outs supply a regular pulse in time with the Casio's beat- the fast one being twice as quick as the slow. The "sync multiply" doubles each. Really, this is just a switch which shifts the signals- I found three pulse outputs that were multiples of each other. A lot of the buttons are actually really useful, and change the drums up in interesting ways. Most of them mess with the sync signals, but you find ones that don't. There is a lot of havoc with the chord accompaniment, for better or worse. Usually worse...
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