Uploaded April 2012 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
The Casio VA-10 has a built in DSP effect processor. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to modify this by fiddling with the address lines to the RAM chip. This can be done to pretty much any effect processor by transplanting the RAM chip to a daughter board with some additional stuff on it, but it's more useful if it's an SRAM without multiplexed row/column address signals. The various effects can be unpredictably transformed into something really unusual (though not necessarily useful). By disabling the write signal, the contents of the memory can be retained, thus creating crude and glitchy looping, sampling or "infinite reverb" effects.
I never ended up finishing it, but the idea was to replace the original RAM chip with a much larger (16x) battery backed memory, and an external box with a bunch of patch points that would permit arbitrary rearrangement or control by various other circuits. By using a counter to step through the different banks (4 most significant bits), the stored sounds can then be sequenced.
If I remember correctly, for this recording I stepped through the 16 banks with a counter, and also controlled the next two most significant bits with variable rate oscillators.
Source material was Otomo Yoshihide's theme from the 1993 film The Blue Kite. Recorded 2008.
The Casio VA-10 has a built in DSP effect processor. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to modify this by fiddling with the address lines to the RAM chip. This can be done to pretty much any effect processor by transplanting the RAM chip to a daughter board with some additional stuff on it, but it's more useful if it's an SRAM without multiplexed row/column address signals. The various effects can be unpredictably transformed into something really unusual (though not necessarily useful). By disabling the write signal, the contents of the memory can be retained, thus creating crude and glitchy looping, sampling or "infinite reverb" effects.
I never ended up finishing it, but the idea was to replace the original RAM chip with a much larger (16x) battery backed memory, and an external box with a bunch of patch points that would permit arbitrary rearrangement or control by various other circuits. By using a counter to step through the different banks (4 most significant bits), the stored sounds can then be sequenced.
If I remember correctly, for this recording I stepped through the 16 banks with a counter, and also controlled the next two most significant bits with variable rate oscillators.
Source material was Otomo Yoshihide's theme from the 1993 film The Blue Kite. Recorded 2008.
