Finally finished up my midi retrofit of the Casio SK1, and I’m very happy indeed with it. The HighlyLiquid UMR kits was a breeze to assemble, and if it hadn’t been for my initial soldering on the kit to the Sk1 board backwards it would have been an afternoon project.

For those repeating this process, triple check the numbers on the ribbon area of the SK1 that you solder the kit to, the 12 is on the left (depends on which way round you’re looking at it, so DOUBLE check).

I have some issues with the sample recorder, sometimes the SK1 needs to be turned on and off to get it to record again and it doesn’t seem to store the sample thru a power cycle (it might never have done this so I can’t fault anything there).

I can see this becoming a pretty useful part of a LIve improv type session, with a laptop, Monome and Sk1, running long Polygomé style midi from the Monome thru the Sk1 using samples recorded there and then.

I’m probably going to look at picking up another 2 or 3 of the SK’s this year, to expand the collection and have some for redundancy.

I’m also still toying with adding some bend points. Though I’m thinking I’ll take it one step further and use digital potentiometers to make the bends automatable from a computer. So it might take some time to work through.

In the meantime, my next Midi retrofit will be the Ace-Tone keyboard that I recently picked up. I’m hoping the 2 octave retrofit will be pretty simple with the MD24 kit from highlyliquid. If it becomes a nightmare I might step it back to retrofitting one of my stylophones instead.