The Reverse Engineers Manifesto:
Obsolete Technology
delivering
Socially Challenged Euphoria

Manifesto Updated 12 November 2004 after receiving 1000 hits.

Australia loves rock music... so it's not surprising that our first exposure to Casiotone keyboards was through indie bands such as The Cannanes (NSW), Turnstyle (WA) and Ninetynine(Vic). I assume the band members were collecting them because they cost nothing to buy and with their small keys were easier to play and transport than "Professional" keyboards - not to mention that having a cute little kid's keyboard on stage was a vital part of the indie aesthetic. All of these bands instinctively knew what we had to do an electronics diploma to find out - 80s Casio keyboards are the ultimate word in keyboard fashion.

Our curiosity drove us to do things like hook our Casios up to computers, run them through distortion pedals, and pull them apart to molest their circuit boards. This is where our obsession started - some models when distorted sounded more menacing than any heavy metal guitar sound; when circuit-bent some models produced random noises more abrasive than any modular synthesiser. When used without effects - they sometimes emulated classic Atari / Commodore video-game sounds.

80s electronic equipment is easy to modify because it features real components, not surface mount bullshit, and cases which are easily unscrewed for servicing. Also, some literature from the 80s is still to be found in old electronics magazines and in Robin Whittle's famous newsletter which showed you how to modify your Casios. He also conducted private experiments interfacing Casio sound generating ICs with other electronics to generate your own Walsh Tones.
Modern keyboards are not built to be repaired by hand; modern keyboards feature planned obsolescence and use more software than hardware; if they break you throw them away - if the sounds are crap you can't change them, unless you can re-program the OS hard coded into the CPU.

Casio keyboards sound different to any other instrument because they use a method of synthesis that has not been used before or since. Casio's method of generating waveforms from about 1980 to 1985 was "Consonant-Vowel Synthesis". Part additive, part subtractive. Part digital, part analog. It involved adding two different waveforms to produce each sound. Ie: the Consonant waveform was used during the attack stage of the envelope before fading out into the Vowel waveform for the sustain/release stage. By combining two simple waveforms in this manner (additive synthesis), then applying filtering (Subtractive synthesis) Casio were able to make deceptively realistic and complex tones.

The most common and versatile of these instruments was the MT-65 (Later reissued as MT-68). It had a modulation feature allowing you to swap the vowel and consonant waveforms as well as apply slow attack to the overall envelope generator.

Furthermore, Casio keyboards were the cheapest on the market. They appealed to Synth players who couldn't afford polyphonic synthesisers and to the domestic/semi-professional market. Casio's could be sold so cheaply because they stored their waveforms as binary numbers, these codes were then re-loaded sequentially from the chip and the waveform rebuilt accordingly.

Meanwhile other manufacturers were struggling…using sampled waveforms stored in memory. The technology needed to do this was very expensive and so they couldn't compete. Interestingly the idea for storing waveforms in memory was already patented by an organ company in the 70's. Some believe this was the motivation behind Casio developing their own method of synthesis.

The drum circuits and filters remained in the analog domain…even the digital to analog converters employed crude resistor ladders instead of chips…explaining why Casiotone keyboards have a warm, fuzzy and sometimes abrasive analogue sound.

The other synthesis technology favoured by the Reverse Engineers, but few other Chip Musicians is FM (Frequency Modulation). FM was invented by John Chowning when his curiosity got the better of him and he decided to see what would happen if the mathematical equation used to broadcast radio frequencies was applied to frequencies that the human ear could perceive. He immediately realised he had discovered a very economical method of creating harmonically rich sounds from two basic sine waves.

American synthesiser companies came to discuss putting his discovery to commercial use but unfortunately they were only familiar with analog synthesis and couldn't get their heads around FM. Eventually a Yamaha technician visited from Japan who understood the principle and the concept was sold to Yamaha.

The original FM keyboard had so much electronics that it filled the inside of a grand piano and even then it required a separate machine to program the voice cards. Yamaha kept developing FM and eventually released the DX-7 which instantly achieved market dominance due to its ability to either imitate real instruments or create other-worldly sounds with a clarity that had never before been thought possible.

The DX-7 pretty much started the war between "analog" and "digital" that still rages to this day. Many people embraced the new sounds, while some deemed it "cold, thin and overpriced".

Yamaha responded to this criticism, releasing versions allowing several FM tones to be added together for a bigger sound. But in hindsight, this sales pitch wasn't entirely necessary… people were already in awe of the powerful features like Touch sensitivity, Polyphony and versatile MIDI implementation…so much so that people still buy them now to use as midi controllers.

Yamaha's FM synthesisers range from Hi-Fi and sterilised "CD Quality", to Low sample rate and low bit depth machines such as the FB-01, which is also an integral part of the Reverse Engineers sound. The limitations of the FB-01's D/A converters give the sound a graininess akin to early 8 bit samplers like the Fairlight.

FM synthesis infiltrated popular consciousness through pop records using DX-7 preset sounds and millions upon millions of early personal computer sound cards, all using Yamaha Chipsets to generate their sounds. Many arcade games had Yamaha's FM chips installed. The Suzuki Unisynth (a hybrid Guitar/Synth that the Reverse Engineers are fond of) also used FM for it's on-board sounds. Nowadays FM is becoming a popular synthesis method for mobile phone ring tones.

Ironically due to FM's success, Casio abandoned consonant- vowel synthesis and set about developing a cheaper alternative to FM in order to win back their market share. Casio's alternative (Phase Distortion Synthesis) was quite good but unfortunately it was never held in the same regard as FM and didn't sell. Once Yamaha started to produce some cheaper FM products, Casio became unable to capture the professional market. Returning to producing keyboards for home and educational use. Casio keyboards became progressively cheaper, less realistic sounding and from an electronic point of view…less interesting.

John Chowning's somewhat naive approach to making/discovering sounds informs and inspires our own work. For example we have found that by opening text documents and program files as sound files a variety of fantastic glitch sounds can be created. No need for expensive plug-ins or hardware. Lateral thinking costs nothing.

Each Casio has different tones and unique features, not found in any other Casio. It would be impractical to bring them all on stage for a performance (the Reverse Engineers at the time of writing this article own over 20 different Casio keyboard). The easy option would be to buy a sampler and use a MIDI keyboard to play all the sounds; however we have decided to take the more challenging route of trying to create increasingly imaginative and innovative modifications and control interfaces for our existing devices. With a few switches, and some wire, and maybe a few diodes, you can turn one Casio into three.

A long term goal result for all our research and detailed examination of waveforms and schematics is to one day make a "Virtual Casiotone" so that laptop musicians will also have access to the sounds - all of the sounds - long after the supply of real Casios has dried up. This is partly inspired by Casio's marketing strategy which resulted in each Casio having a gimmicky semi-professional feature which was completely unnecessary on a home keyboard - as well as their engineering philosophy which meant that these features were all implemented in the most improbable and cost-effective manner. This is in a contrast to the parallel Yamaha home-keyboards, which had very practical and strongly musical useful features as well as more commonsense, and sometimes less ambitious circuit designs.

Yamaha and Casio are both guilty of manufacturing keyboards which are so easy to play that anyone can pick one up and be inspired to write a song in a few minutes. American Post Rock group Trans Am boast that they wrote about ten songs in one day using a Casio. In the mainstream CD market, Trans Am are a Casio success story. Their blatant use of the Casio MT-40 preset "Synth Fuzz" is prominent in their track Koln. They became the ultimate Casio group when they scored an endorsement with Casio keyboards. Electro-Pop mogul producer Jimmy Tamborello (who heads the outfits Figurine, Dntel and The Postal Service) makes frequent use of Yamaha and Casio home keyboard sounds. The auto-chord and auto-arpeggio functions on these keyboards - as cheesy and as noticeable as they are - have provided the inspiration for people across the world to start playing keyboard and start writing songs.

In the 1980s most households owned at least one Commodore 64s, Atari 2600s or Casio home keyboard. An entire generation was raised listening to the sounds of computer game music and cheesy square-wave keyboards and, as a consequence, most perceive these sounds as something familiar and comforting, like an old friend. This is in contrast with older generations see who hear them as unrealistic, irritating and alienating. There is a generation gap between those born pre-chip music and those born post-chip music. This gives chip musicians a strong sense of identity in the same way that previous styles of music have given young people a chance to rebel against tradition and established styles. However unlike punk music, this rebellion is more about creating than destroying - instead of vandalising property in the name of "anarchy" and self-destruction from drugs, people are challenging their minds, and reaching deep into their hearts to create music with minimal equipment and to further develop the technology that corporations have long since abandoned. What is trash to many corporations, is our treasure.

In that light, chip music is also a rebellion against the major music companies. Chip Musicians aren't buying their new products, or just walking into a shop and buying the most expensive synthesiser they can get their hands on. The time when expensive music equipment was a status symbol is an epoch at it's end. Most Chip Musicians don't even have to buy CDs or records anymore. They just use the keyboard they found in the shed and software they downloaded for free off the Internet, and they make songs they like more than anything you can get off the shelf. These tools enable their friends to make tunes expressing their ways of life, and their social positions, and anyone of them can make these songs freely available to the users of the world wide web in a variety of format.

The Reverse Engineers give maximum respect to the corporations that developed these technologies. A constant topic of conversation at Reverse Engineers HQ is just how amazing it is that Yamaha and Casio managed to pack to much technology into such a simple circuit. However: the irony is that they made their old equipment so well that people are still using it and it's reducing sales of their modern keyboards. Many chip music enthusiasts are now prepared to spend hundreds of dollars on EBay bidding for obsolete keyboards to play or modify because the supply at markets and second hand stores has dried up. The corporations aren't helping themselves either; their refusal to recognise the demand for their old products shows just how out of touch they are with consumers.
Thankfully, people have taken the initiative and developed their own solutions, the popularity of the a variety of hand-held game console programs, and modified Casio SK-1's being good examples. If Nintendo won't mass develop the hardware or software required, someone else will. Inspired by this, we are developing our own Casio accessories and if there is still a market for them by the time we make them, we will not hesitate to further erode corporate profit margins.

Roland refuses to re-issue their analog drum machines while Casio and Yamaha continue to concentrate on selling over-priced and "realistic" PCM keyboards. If we did receive an endorsement from Casio or another manufacturer, it would only be on the sole condition that they remake technology that we, and other Chip Musicians actually use. We would be betraying ourselves, and this very document, if we told the kids to buy Casio keyboards if they didn't sound anything like the ones we actually use.

When a lot of people start doing the same thing, that thing becomes fashionable. When something is fashionable it can be mass-produced and sold.

The downside to our passion becoming fashion is that the equipment we use and love is becoming harder to find and more expensive to buy, enforcing poverty as we continue to expand our arsenal of obsolete technology. People on the Internet are fighting over theoretically subjective issues such as "What Is Chip Music" when "Chip Music" is unique for each individual practitioner, depending on their motivations, situations, their mindset, and the equipment they own and how far they want to take it. There is also the concern that media interest could kill the scene by making people famous before they have mastered their art, hence setting them up for public humiliation. This does not worry us. The same phenomenon occurs in rock and pop music all the time and it hasn't stopped people from buying rock and pop records … yet.

This is offset by the increased interest in what we do and the fact that we can now do live performances. Five years ago people would not have given us gigs, but since Malcom Mclaren has been talking up "Chip Music" people are curious to find out what it is. Some people are even ready to accept it. Simultaneously our art has been both legitimised and pigeonholed. It hasn't changed the way we work, only the amount of work we do has increased, which has lead to an increase in cash outlay and a serious decrease in the amount of time we sleep. Of course we'd rather be pigeonholed, sleepless and lose a lot of money than be denied the opportunity to get up on stage and share our ideals, and do what make us truly happy.

Electroclash is defined by people who can't play instruments but still want to cash in on the 80s revival. The prime example are Chicks on Speed. Fashion designers but for fun decided to release records too. Electroclash can be as simple as wearing 80s fashion while screaming over some distorted MIDI files or drum beats from a cassette. A more charitable view is that electroclash is a high art version of avant garde fused with cheesy 80s melodrama mixed with some lo-fi punk rock attitude. This view proliferated in crystal meth-infested New York clubs and died out after about a month because everyone knew it was trendy and stopped doing it. The media has now turned its attention from Electroclash to chip music-probably because chip music is easy to define considering its direct relationship to video game technology, and easy to promote considering its cleaner, electronics nerd image.

LoFi was originally used to describe bands such as Beat Happening, Sebadoh, Of Montreal, Smudge and Guided By Voices who, out of financial necessity, recorded their songs on domestic four-track equipment with bad microphones and out-of-tune guitars. They used Beatles and Kinks records as the benchmark for sound aesthetic, including all the static buzzes, tape hiss and microphone pops as well as other noises which were retained on the old recordings, adding "character" to the sound. This became fashionable as it was seen to be a rebellion against hi fi studio recordings where sounds were edited, sterilised and where the frequency and dynamic range of sounds were continually maximised due to the use of digital technology and other professional noise-free equipment.

The LoFi branch of electronic music, however, involves the use of keyboards, synthesisers or home computers which have limited frequency range (often excessive treble, or muddy indistinguishable bass frequencies). They use what Hi-Fi studios would consider weaknesses as strengths. Non-musical noises: glitches, distortions, poor digital to analog conversion, clicks, low sample rates, low bit depths, the poor frequency response of the speakers built into monitors and small keyboards.

Lo Fi is using your home stereo of cheap-o computer speakers to record your album with, not spending two thousand dollars on a pair of monitors. Lo Fi is using a $20 mic from a pawn shop instead of spending $500 on some "tube" piece of metal. Lo Fi guitarists use tube amps, but Lo Fi electronic musicians don't even use those. Solid State all the way!!!

The purpose of Hi-fi is to attenuate frequencies that the human ear is most receptive to and to emphasise the frequencies the ear has trouble perceiving. This allows you to hear all instruments clearly and makes the recording sound balanced. Lo-fi is about leaving the sound as it is and not trying to compensate for any psycho-acoustic effects or to homogenize recordings so they sound relatively the same on a range of different stereo systems. Leaving the sounds as they are makes songs sound at turns warmer, or more abrasive and more exciting than they would sound if they were professionally recorded and mastered. This also leaves the sound of the album as an individual experience for the listener, on their own equipment.

As far as we are concerned, Lo-Fi is a financial and practical necessity. We don't have time when we rehearse to do 400 takes of the same riff to get it perfect. We can't afford to spend $100,000 to record in a professional studio. There is no way we could create music if we were trying to make professional hi-fi recordings. Being lo-fi means that we can forget about the recording process and just get the song finished, convey the raw emotion of our compositions. The ultimate point is if the song is good enough, people will be so interested in the words, the melody, or the rhythm, and they will overlook how it was recorded. Alternatively, if a song is terrible it doesn't matter how well it was recorded or how much money was spent - it will still be a bad song. If we ever got corporate label funding, our activities could be like Fisherspooner, and we could make hi-fi recordings of our songs, however, we can't see that happening any time soon.

Chip music can be any style or genre, performed using a laptop, or a Casio, or a cheap home organ. It can be on the original hardware, or even possibly on a professional synthesiser workstation. As long as it is inspired by 80s videogame music or sounds found in 80s popular music. As long as it tried to push the boundary of sound. As long as it expresses some real emotion, or some real point of view.

Chip Musicians often have more practical electronics knowledge than musical ability; this allows them to program, restore and maintain the equipment they find in op-shops, markets and garage sales.

Chip music is so named because it generally does not involve traditional acoustic or electric rock instruments. It is often created using Commodore 64, Atari or Amiga computers to create mod, midi or sid files-software that emulates old video game sounds on modern computers. Some other equipment used includes: Casio or Yamaha 80 home keyboards in original or modified form, and Gameboys or other electronic devices to make sounds; only the technology available, and people's imagination limit what can be done. Chip music varies between such extremes as underground dance music, cheesy 80s pop music, or improvised noise performances.

The term Chip Music was first coined to mean Music, made with Original Sound Chips.

The Reverse Engineers were formed after an Undue Noise event in Bendigo. A friendship struck up between Bill and Edward resulted in them sitting up all night, talking about the Frostwave Alienator which is a hardware sample rate decimator, which allows you to manipulate the sample rate of any audio signal in real time (the same way people were doing it with software on their lap tops). Being the first hardware effect unit that can perform this function properly, we downloaded some audio samples of what it sounded like and Edward set about constructing his own software version to emulate it (which we worked on all night, perfecting it's sound and jamming with it). It took a while to achieve perfection, but we did it.

Reverse Engineering is what companies do to each other - they take apart each other's products, find out how they work, and then produce their own for a cheaper price or with an improved design. Having spent six hours reverse engineering and making a variety of bizarre noises in the process, we thought that it was typical of the creative processes we are involved in. We are inspired by new sounds more than anything else, but to make the new sounds you need to build new equipment.

Fame Policy Like politicians, if we become elected the presidents of the chip music scene, we promise to do the following things with the money any record company would be stupid enough to give us.

1. Laser hair removal
   We find anything other than playing with our C64s, Yamahas and Casios a boring and tedious task - eating and sleeping are tolerated, but, shaving is a chore to be avoided. Of course we have to eat and sleep, but if we get laser hair removal we won't have to shave, so that will save us a lot of time, which we can put towards reading schematics and soldering.
2. Props to 555 records
   Beck set a precent by releasing albums on K-records while still being under contract to Geffen, so we'd definitely have to give a heap of money to Stewart Anderson so he can get his record label 555 pressing vinyl and distributed world-wide again. He deserves it for releasing chip music before it was cool and continuing to release lo-fi records after everyone else had given up on it. As far as we know, Stewart was the first person to fuse lo-fi rock / pop with chip music / drum and bass, and we find it unacceptable that someone so talented has been forced to scale back his operations. Reverse Engineers and 555 all the way!
3. Spiritual Leader
   The MC-5 had a spiritual leader and it would be our rock star prerogative to make sure we had our own. Australia's Robin Whittle is the obvious choice for being our well-paid technical aide. Back in the 80s he was doing what we are now trying to do with Casios and Yamahas. You have to respect someone who was twenty years a head of his time. So basically, we'd wheel him out five minutes before some of our shows to enlighten the audience with a rant about a particular Casio or Yamaha feature (and his unique view of life in general)
4. Nationwide Hard Rubbish Info Line
   A hotline would be set up in Australia so that when the local council puts out obsolete whitegoods/computers for kerb-side collection, people can report Casio/Commodore/Atari sightings. We would send out one of our trained professionals (spearheaded by Russell Jarvis) to rescue the equipment before it is collected and sent to the landfill. If we end up with more equipment than we need, we would fill up a warehouse and sell whatever we want to on ebay.
5. Frostwave
   Another goal is to sponsor local Analogue effects manufacturer Paul Perry to build us custom devices, and to buy one of each of his complete line of effects and devices.