VINTAGE Casio MT-36 Casiotone 44-Key Synthesizer

Piano Type

Electric piano

Number Of Keys

44

Brand

Casio Casiotone

and is likely semi- analogue. Also the snare is a bit dull but has a nicely grainy POKEY timbre (likely shift register noise). Unusual is that despite partly digital percussion, this instrument has still a real analogue tempo slider. (The rhythm speed can be adjusted from very low to quite high.) The combination of plain squarewave sounds with polyphony and digital percussion is quite unusual for Casio, because they normally used "Consonant Vowel Synthesis" (2 mixed squarewaves with independent envelopes) in their older polyphonic instruments (see Casio CT-410V for explanation) and timbres based on samples in their later ones. Despite there is a single finger chord accompaniment, this instrument has no manual chord mode; when the "casio chord" slide switch is on, the thing always starts rhythm when any chord section keys are hit. (Likely this is simply a hardwired synchro start diode in the keyboard matrix; removing it would enable manual chord like with Casio MT-90.)  The rhythm always automatically inserts a fill-in (with accompaniment track when on) every 4th bar; this stupid feature also existed in some Yamaha keyboards (e.g. PS-20 and MP-1), but unlike there it can not even be turned off. In the manual stands that the demo melody of the MT-36 would be the German folk song "Unterlanders Heimweh", but the tune it plays sounds very different from the wonderful music called "Unterlanders Heimweh" on the ROM-Pack RO-551 (which corresponds to the famous demo of Casio VL-Tone 1) - instead it sounds just like a rural folk waltz and resembles a bit "Little Brown Jug". (Read more about the unofficial Casio anthem "Unterlanders Heimweh" here.) The simple folk waltz tune is also just a very short monoto that cycles through all 6 preset sounds again and again without any complex accompaniment changes or the like, but at least you can play to it or change the preset sound and tempo. An MT-36 variant with 49 full-size keys was released as Casio CT-102 (seen on eBay, came out in a black and white version). A competitive product to the MT-36 was likely the Yamaha PSS-150, which looks and sounds quite similar