Metku Mods, a hardware modding site, has an interesting step-by-step photo essay on modding a Casio CTK 530 keyboard.
Why spend hours turning a cheesy Casio keyboard into a control keyboard that only offers limited control? Here’s modder Jani Pönkkö’s reason:
When not modding, I usually compose some music. As an input device for the music software, I use old Casio CTK 530 keyboard. One day I realized how ugly it really is, so it’s time for modding, once again!
Pönkkö spent nothing on the project, using scraps from earlier mod projects, and ended up with an one-of-a-kind, minimal keyboard controller.
doing odd things to my guitars ad keyboards is one of the things I remember enjoying when I was younger, nothing radical, setting up the action on my fender rhodes, opening up my farfisa and seeing what lit up and how the sound changed when you touched bits. Modern Keyboards seem to inhibit that, but now you can actually get old/cheap/free keyboards at prices that you might put on a decent bet, so why not get in there and see what happens?
So many of us complain that music and sound is getting boring and predictable – I certainly find the increasing power of technology has a big “so what?” factor into sounds and beats. I reckon I’ll open up my old psr keyboard, chuck out the speakers, bodge some midi outputs on it, a line output, maybe put chorus or multi-effects across the outputs – it’s worth nowt, so I might as well go for it. should be good for jamming.
I would like to know how much is this keyboard as soon as possible…