Friday, August 20, 2010

Casio Vl-Tone

As you can see from a few post down, this is not my first attempt at bending my Vl-tone. The first time through was OK, but glitchy. For my top panel I used a piece of stainless steel that unfortunately conducted the current from my potentiometers dropping the pitch. Also at the time, the only wire I had was too thick and stiff to work with. So I decided to rip it all apart and start over. This is what I did:

So here are the mods. I used a little help from Casper electronics, he has a mod sheet that gives you a few patch points and three pots. I ended up only using four of the patch points and all three of his pot mods. I also added three extra pots by externally replacing the VLs internal pots. Then I tested and tested and found twelve other patch points that I liked. So that is from the left all the pots and the black RCA jacks.

As for the white RCA jacks, they function as a switch bay triggered by the switches to the right. The smart observer will notice there are nine switches in the array. One turns the bay into a multiple, the top row (on-off-on) engages the bay or sends it to the switches below. Those switches a attached to capacitors and diodes to further change the sound. The pots about the switch array are part of a home made low pass filter with frequency and resonance. Then there is a volume and reset button.

Video to come.

2 comments:

  1. Impressive work - one of the more interesting bent VL-Tones that I've seen.
    I'm planning to have ago at one myself. Any chance you can give more info on the low pass filter you built?

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  2. hey. looks great. could you maybe add your bending points to the picture casperelectronic made?

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