And possibly they were right with this one. Still, here it is: the wondrous tinny weirdness of Casio's VL series of calculators / bizarro musical synthesizers, recreated for Kontakt. If you failed your maths class because you were laboriously trying to "program" the synth engine in one of these things by keying strings of baffling parameter values into its little LCD screen, you can now relive the experience (but with helpful sliders, and no fear of suddenly being called on to solve the quadratic equation on the board in front of a load of sniggering teenagers).
The Rhythmic Robot version of the VL allows you to blend and adjust any three of the six original calculator's six onboard presets in varying amounts, detuning and filtering them to achieve surprisingly rich tones. Everything is rendered in glorious low-bit-depth grainy digital, of course; and you have the option to hear the sound via the headphone output jack or via a convolved speaker circuit (for added squonky tinniness). It's a very simple little recreation of a very simple little instrument, but with a touch of chorus and a tweak of the envelope settings you can get everything from bit-tune-style bleepiness to oddball synth sounds out of it... and we've even made sure to type 5318008 into the LCD for you
Head on over to https://www.rhythmicrobot.com/product/vl-calc to hear the VL Calc in action – and to grab it at a 25% discount!
Happy calculating!
The Professor (and Mongo)
PS – All purchases on our site are now earning "MongoMoney" reward points, which can be redeemed against further purchases. If you've been buying stuff recently and not clocked this, do check out how much you've earned: you might be surprised (and, indeed, able to grab yourself something completely free)
