They don’t make ’em like that any more: the Casio VL-1 pocket synthesizer
Back in the late 1970s, every keyboard player in almost any genre of popular music wanted a synthesizer. I know I did. The sort of venue where your awful college blues-rock band might perform probably had a piano – almost certainly out of tune – but anything else you had to bring with you. I had an original Rhodes-Fender electric piano, which I got in perfect working order for just a few quid from a junk shop – proof that there is a benevolent deity after all. For a while I had a Hammond-style drawbar organ, but it wasn’t particularly portable. I even – Heaven help me – had a Stylophone.
As splendid as these instruments were in their own ways, they weren’t synthesisers. They couldn’t make those weow-weow-weow or mwooooaaar sounds that we wanted. Of course, synthesisers did exist: we just couldn’t afford them. They were all essentially analog devices in those days – hugely complex with control panels like an airliner’s flight deck. If you were a Pink Floyd or a Jean-Michel Jarre you could justify the expense; if you were the Radioactive Cabbage Band from Guildford, not so much.
Casio’s VL-1 first entered my life in a 1981 episode of Tomorrow’s World, the BBC’s popular science programme. In this episode – which was broadcast live, as they all were – presenter Michael Rodd gamely demonstrated how the pocket-sized device could be programmed to produce sounds in the same way as a traditional analog synthesizer, but using numbers to configure the parameters. I watched, mouth agape, as the weird-looking instrument produced the kinds of sounds that I’d heard from the Minimoog that was totally beyond my financial means. It wasn’t just a synthesizer: the VL-1 was also a recording sequencer, allowing tracks of up to 100 notes to be stored and edited. I was totally captivated.
My enthusiasm faded when I reasoned that this much functionality, crammed into a foot-long plastic stick, must cost hundreds, if not thousands of pounds.
It turns out I was wrong: the VL-1 could be had mail-order for a mere £39.99. In 2025 money that’s about £150. This was a reasonable expenditure, even for a student, and it wasn’t long before I had one.
I had no particular expectation of playing the VL-1 live on stage, although some brave musicians did just that. Rather, I just saw it as a kind of compositional toy. With the VL-1 I could record a (short) piece of music using the built-in sequencer, and then play it back whilst I played along on the piano or guitar. I could do the same sort of thing with a tape deck, of course, but the VL-1 was hugely more convenient.
As well as a sound generator and sequencer, the VL-1 was a drum machine, of a kind. The drum sounds were really just bursts of white noise (hiss) and various beeps. The VL-1’s rhythm section sounded like Pacman. Still, at the least, you could use the drum sounds as a kind of metronome, for getting your recordings in time. This was effective because the VL-1 stored the note pitches separately from the timings: you could key in the notes as sloppily as you liked, and then synchronize them by poking a single button in time to the drum track. You could even add and remove notes from the middle of a track.
To get the sounds of an analog synth, you used the piano keyboard to enter strings of digits, where each digit represented one of the sound parameters – these digits served a similar purpose to the rotary controls on the front panel of an analog synth. We discovered some of the best sounds just by entering numbers at random, and listening to what came out.
This was all possible, and at an affordable price, because the VL-1 was an all-digital instrument. Although it made the kinds of sounds we associated with the analog instruments of Moog, et al., the VL-1 did all its sound generation mathematically. The VL-1 was, in fact, the very first, commercially-available all-digital musical instrument. This fact alone makes it worthy of note; that it did what it did in such a user-friendly way, and at such a low price, was truly remarkable. That Mr Rodd could program it live on Tomorrow’s World – a program we watched as much for the amusing failures as for the content – was a testament to its ease of use.
If that wasn’t enough, you could keep the VL-1 in your pocket, and use it as a calculator.
Of course, the VL-1 wasn’t perfect. Most obviously, although it could produce the same kinds of sounds as an analog synth, the sound quality wasn’t remotely comparable. With a sampling rate of less than 10kHz, and 6-bit samples, the sound was decidedly crunchy. It was monophonic, although that was less of a limitation than it might have been: playing even one of the tiny keys at a time accurately was difficult enough; playing chords would have required superhuman dexterity. I’m fairly sure that everybody who played a VL-1 on stage just used a single button to clock notes out of the sequencer. In fact, if you watch the video of Trio’s Da Da Da, you’ll see the vocalist doing exactly that.
For all its faults – none of which were surprising at its price point – the VL-1 introduced all-digital musical synthesis to the world. It also demonstrated that a digital instrument could emulate an analog one, and be programmed in the same way. The VL-1 presented an amplitude envelope in terms of attack, decay, sustain, and release parameters, just as the Minimoog did. This wasn’t the only way to configure sound properties in a digital instrument: Yamaha’s hugely-popular DX7 would also be all-digital, but Yamaha threw away completely any compatibility with analog programming. The DX7 could produce some wonderful sounds, but we discovered them by trial-and-error, not by logic.
After the VL-1, Casio went on to introduce the concept of digital sampling synthesis to the commercial world, with a range of inexpensive sampling keyboards. I bought the SK-5 when it was released in 1985, and had hours of fun playing tunes made up of samples of my own belches. Because, why not? The SK-5 had some limited polyphony, so I could harmonize with myself entirely in sung curse-words. As frivolous as this pastime was, it inspired in me a life-long fascination with vocal harmony.
Still, the SK-5 and its siblings were conventional electronic keyboards, while the VL-1 was… what was it exactly? I’m still not sure I know.
Although the VL-1 spearheaded a revolution in digital music production, it faded into obscurity, and I don’t think anybody ever marketed anything like it. People who write about the ‘most significant synthesizers in history’ and such-like rarely mention the VL-1, despite its being a true innovation, which is sad.
These days, we can get smartphone apps that do what the VL-1 did, and do it better, so perhaps there is no need for a similar product. Still, when I think what could be achieved in a device the size of the VL-1, using today’s technology, I can’t help thinking we’re missing out.
