Scandal At The Parkade

I bought a Rap-Master (featuring Voice Effector) at a garage sale recently. Simply put, I had to have it. It’s basically a 1985 Casio keyboard with some added “rap” style rhythms, and a few other little gems. Here is a brief list of features:

• 30 rhythms, 12 new “beats” that allow fills
• 25 instruments, including sitar, church bells, gamelan, car horn, and many other rap related sounds
• A microphone
• “Voice Effector” which is 4 settings, that mutate your voice, 2 lower, 2 heighten
• Extra percussion buttons on the side, for doing fills
• A “turntable” that makes a couple of different sounds, but is basically a button you turn
• Monophony, yes, monophony

It’s got a bunch of other “standard” features, for 1985 at least. For three dollars it’s already amused me sufficiently. Probably the best feature (which I did not employ in the audio below) is that you can feedback the microphone with the effects and the instruments and rhythms sound like The Pod. I was hoping that Mike might want to use this for something, but I’ll probably just record some more Ween style stuff later on.

Also here’s a song. I did all of it except the banjo in one take, and I mixed the banjo pretty low anyway. It’s real hi-fi. Dave liked it, too, I’m glad.