Elite - Little Musicmaster

Elite - Little Musicmaster
This blatant imitation of a Casio VL-Tone 1 I found on a flea market. Unlike the original this is a very simple toy organ with only plain squarewave beeps, no rhythms and no synthesizer.

Here you see my original VL-Tone 1 from 1981 and below it the "Little Musicmaster"

main feature:

25 button keys
2 loudspeakers
switches for volume (4 steps), vibrato (genuinely tremolo) and tempo (4 steps)
simple sequencer (record/ playback)
monophonic plain squarewave sound (not crystal clocked)
10 short demo tunes (rather simple monotos)
no display but empty PCB solder pads where possibly a display was planned

Here you can see the fake display with the empty PCB solder pads. In reality the row begins at the left edge of the logo, but this isn't visible here due to the logo shadow.

notes:

This instrument has the likely world- slowest responding keys; they sometimes take up to 0.5s to react on a key press, but it may have to do with the badly working silicone contacts of my specimen; also cleaning didn't help. (After warming up they work better.) By pressing "AUTO", any of the black keys play demos. In the battery box are 6 places for mignon batteries, but only 4 have contacts. At the remaining 2 was a sticker: "TO INSTALL SPARE BATTERIES", but this looks quite unlogical, because the instrument needs 4 batteries and mixing old with new batteries can result in leaking, thus I guess the plastic case was designed for a different hardware variant; also the fact that the "vibrato" slide switch has 2 "off"- positions (off, on, off) is evidence for this. On the battery cover stands "PATENT PENDING 1007823". On the box stands the German shopping center name "Kaufhof AG Köln".

*removal of these screws voids warranty...*

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