SEK-922 8-Bit Keyboard

This keyboard belonged to my sister growing up, and enamoured of the sharp and buzzy sounds still blaring from its ageing 8-bit sound chip, she very kindly asked me take it off her hands.

Upon discovering the thing didn’t have an audio jack, I resolved to faithfully record its bloops and bleeps with a stereo pair of condenser mics pointed at the drivers. The original keyboard unsurprisingly has no built-in envelopes, so to equip it with a bit of modern transient control I decided to add some amplitude and filter envelopes, along with dials for glide, panning and velocity tracking. Whilst the dials and faders are modelled on the original, the additional functionality required me to redesign the layout (though I felt it’d be a crime to leave out the original printed voice list and retro drum icons).

A few hundred lines of code later and OH MY, it’s the most majestic bundle of lossy nostalgia, evocative of tiny Gameboy screens, cathode ray tubes and wired controllers. The raw patches are lovely as-is, but I’ve found you can get some surprisingly modern sounds out of it with some creative envelope manipulation and a few choice effects.

Hope you all enjoy it, and happy experimenting!