[GREG CURVEY PLAYING A CASIO VL-TONE]

GREG CURVEY: I'm Greg Curvey with the band The Luck of Eden Hall.

This is the Casio VL-Tone. Mostly it's 1980 or 1981. I bought it brand new back then. My friends at the time had a band called Scarlet Architect which were -- they were an awesome three-keyboard band. They used Casios, the MT-30 and the VL-Tones, so this is the VL-Tone.

It's a toy [GREG CURVEY PLAYING A CASIO VL-TONE] but you could program sounds in this thing. Once again, you're talking 1980 and back then things weren't this small, you know I mean prior to that you didn't see things this small that was a keyboard. I remember my dad in the living room had a Genie 88, which was an organ, one of those family organs that you could press a button and it played the drum rhythms and then you could play your music along with the drum rhythms, and this little monster can do all that for you, which sounds actually cooler because it's like a toy.

It has its own speaker...

[GREG CURVEY TESTING THE CASIO VL-TONE'S VOLUME]

...so there's volume and it has a volume for the melody or the rhythm.

The other bad thing about it is it just has a little jack that you can get an adapter and put it in but it's not the best so you either have to duct tape it on there or hold it very tight, right? I mean if you had this thing sitting down and it wasn't moving, it would probably be fine, but I think the best thing to do, what they always do is duct tape their cords down.

One of the very cool things about this machine is you can record a lick. I can't remember. It's up to 100 notes I think, maybe 99 notes, so let's see this.

[GREG CURVEY RECORDS A SEQUENCE ON THE CASIO VL-TONE]

Okay, put it on play. Now, instead of having to touch these little buttons, you can play everything with these two buttons right here.

[GREG CURVEY PLAYS BACK SEQUENCE ON THE CASIO VL-TONE USING TWO BUTTONS]

So that's pretty neat. You can also just hit the button, and it will play it for you.

[GREG CURVEY PLAYS BACK SEQUENCE ON THE CASIO VL-TONE]

You can speed it up

[GREG CURVEY SPEEDS UP TEMPO DURING PLAYBACK ON THE CASIO VL-TONE]

You can slow it down.

[GREG CURVEY SLOWS DOWN TEMPO DURING PLAYBACK ON THE CASIO VL-TONE]

Okay. SO that's pretty cool. It has low, middle, and high octave. It has a variety of sounds: piano, fantasy, violin, flute, guitar, and ADSR. Why they call these things like piano, flute, guitar, they never saw them like that so it's kind of strange. I guess they had to call it something. ADSR: Attack, Decay, Sustain, and Rate. You can set it on there. You put it on calculator. Instead on ADSR, you put it on calculator, hit in a series of numbers, lets do nines, and then put it on play.

[GREG CURVEY PROGRAMS A SOUND AND PLAYS IT BACK ON THE CASIO VL-TONE]

So we just made up that sound. You can put in a series of numbers. Each number stands for something. Stands for the vibrato, how quick or how slow it's going to be. Stands for the sound meaning if it's going to be the piano-based, fantasy-based, or violin-based or whatever, and then you can make up a sound. You can make up another one real quick here. Calculator, clear it, we did all nines, let's just do, let's just make up a number, play...

[GREG CURVEY PROGRAMS A SOUND AND PLAYS IT BACK ON THE CASIO VL-TONE]

...there's a different sound.

One of my first bands, while we set up next to the drummer, we had the little lick programmed in there so that he could stop on this break and hit the little dude, you know, so it was just kind of a novelty synthesizer sound that we could throw out because it was the only synthesizer we owned at the time, and this was back when The Cars were playing so of course we wanted to have some type of synthesizer in the band.

Anyway, that was a long time ago. I was very young. I think it was two.

It gives you a choice of rhythms: your march, your waltz, 4 beat, swing, rock 1, rock 2, bossa nova, samba, rhumba, and beguine. You hit the rhythm button, hit your choice, let's pick rock.

[GREG CURVEY PROGRAMS PLAYS BACK ROCK RHYTHM ON THE CASIO VL-TONE]

That's awesome isn't it? So now this is -- You can have the rhythm louder than the melody or the melody louder than the rhythm. We'll hit rhythm, rock, tempo, you can slow it down for your sleep covers or your Black Sabbath or whatever you want to play that's heavy and slow. Where I come in, you can speed it up for your Dead Kennedys. You can change the rhythm. Okay. Now before we have a headache, let's just hit that one and turn it off.