http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3gy9VrcX68
This is a rendition of Jarre’s Oxygene played entirely on a cheap Casio toy organ (except percussion and sound effects).
Why?
“Just to see if it was possible to get a minimally recognizable result, and to show that you don’t need lots of expensive keyboards to have fun playing classic synth stuff.”
All lines were played by hand with no sequencer and no MIDI, just a multitrack recorder. Some parts were just ad-libbed or deliberately changed to sound better with the (very) limited range of available sounds, but you’ll get a general idea of arrangements and overall mood.
Not bad for a $20 casio toy!
Let me know what you think of covering Jean Michelle Jarre’s Oxygene on a cheap Casio toy!
via cmatsuoka
This made me smile so much. How resourceful, bravo! Jarre has long been strong with melodies — it wouldn’t be as easy to do glitchy percussion edits on this. Wait, unless you went mad circuit-bending. =D
Phaser makes just about anything sound more interesting.
Hmm, perhaps it’s actually possible to hack out a poor man’s minipops from a mini-organ by adding some simple circuitry, provided that the instrument generates sine and sawtooth waveforms (in case of a PCM rompler these could be the brass and flute timbres). My minipops was made entirely out of these basic waves, sine for most instruments and a filtered sawtooth for guiro and quijada. You would need a way to trigger these waveforms in sequence and pass them through an envelope generator and a high-pass filter (that in the old analog way, I think you dont’t have enough sample memory in these mini-organs to add the entire sound digitally anyway).
Regarding phaser, yes, I think most of the Oxygene atmosphere comes from phaser and minipops. The only problem is that a phaser costs something like twice or three times the price of the instrument itself!
Not to be confused with the Claudio above me :P, but I do have to say that this was pretty impressive for a $20 Casio keyboard. It made me smile just as Torley did. Proof that it’s not the instrument that makes the musician. 🙂