I have very few good memories of 2020. It was the year that I lost a couple of people who were very close and dear to me.
One of the people that I lost was a musician I have known for years, and who I loved dearly. Out of respect for his family I am not going to disclose his identity.
He was someone however, who greatly influenced my rock and blues playing. For the sake of this article, I will refer to him as Bill.
Bill was a very private man, and very well known in the music industry. He and I first met over a decade ago, and our favourite past time was jamming for hours.
My intro to the Casio DH-100
After playing our real horns together, sometimes Bill would pull out his two Casio DH-100 Digital Horns. I had no idea what I was doing on this bit of vintage electronica, so he would simply play circles around me. He played everything he did on his regular saxophones, and everything he ever recorded, on this tiny plastic instrument that so many consider a toy.
Bill had repaired both of them, so neither had that potential pig squeal that the Casio Digital Horns are known for. Furthermore, on the one he used regularly, he did some mods that allowed him to attach a standard soprano sax MP so he could play it with his favourite Légère Signature Series reed.
I don’t know how he had the DH-100 hooked into his sound system, but they were playable through a complex rack-mount system Bill had in his home studio. These things sounded absolutely amazing. Anyone who thinks the Casio DH-100 is a POS has never heard one hooked up through a proper sound system.
Which brings us to today
I did end up with a few things from Bill’s studio. These two DH-100 were among the few items I brought home since they meant something to me. Now they are in my studio, and remind me of the times Bill and I held our marathon jam sessions. Sadly though, I am not an electronics whiz like Bill was, and these DH-100s sound like a shadow of their former selves.
This is why I am putting this out here in hopes that someone is going to come across this article and help me out.
- If you own a DH-100—or any of the Casio DH series horns like the DH-200, DH-280, DH-500, DH-800—and you have it connected to a keyboard, amp, or anything, please let me know what you doing, and what your set-up and connections are. I would so appreciate it.
I realize I will never duplicate the sound that Bill had, but I would like to do these horns justice. They are so much more than people think.
Besides having a MIDI out connection, which allows the user to control other sound sources such as synthezisers, the DH-100 uses something called aftertouch. Patchman Music describes the Casio DH-100 aftertouch feature this way:
The DH-100 is a very expressive MIDI controller. It transmits MIDI aftertouch data in response to your breath. It transmits variable velocity in response to how hard you attack a note.
- Is there anyone out there who has been able to utilize this aftertouch technology? If so, how have you done it? Quite frankly, I am a techno idiot when it comes to this stuff, so I am completely out of my depth.
Any assistance greatly appreciated
If you are an owner of any model Casio Digital Horn and can offer me in assistance in how to get the best sound out of this little unit, please leave a comment below, or use the Contact Page to drop me a note. Thank you so much!
I should mention I do have a page dedicated to the Casio Ditial Horns on my website. If you are looking for information about this vintage bit of saxophone/synthetizer/electronica, I might just have what you’re looking for.
Hi! Simon here from London, UK.
I have a Casio DH-100 which I no longer use – I have moved on to the far more flexible, expressive and portable Artinoise re.corder, which I view as the Casio’s spiritual successor as an affordable MIDI woodwind controller.
About the DH-100 and its MIDI specification: it really is basic and unconfigurable. If the DH-100 were a screwdriver, you might be lucky and find that it happens to fit the screw that you want to turn. You might just as easily find it completely unsuitable.
Let me explain. Apart from sending note-on and note-off commands via MIDI, the Casio horn doesn’t send much else:
Velocity, telling the desination sound source how hard you STARTED blowing the note, but not what the note did after that.
Continuous Controller 65 (CC65 to its friends). That extra knuckle key above the left hand – if you press, it sends a message that activates portamento… on synths that recognise that message. It’s a crap-shoot – some do, many don’t. And you can’t re-assign it to do anything more useful.
Channel Aftertouch. Less exciting than it sounds, but the key to the Casio’s expressive potential. Why Casio chose to transmit continuous breath pressure as a stream of Aftertouch commands rather then the more obvious CC11 (Expression), CC7 (Volume), or even CC2 (yes, Breath Pressure!) may never be known, but a lot of synths are fortuitously pre-configured to respond smoothly to Aftertouch in a woodwind-friendly manner. If your synth isn’t one of those (Casio, of all manufacturers – GUILTY!!!), tough.
Of course, you can use a computer to convert Aftertouch messages to any other MIDI CC, but why couldn’t they have included a switch with a few other options?
Anyway, my advice is to get a shiny new Artinoise re.corder (completely configurable, with a 3d accelerometer and MIDI via Bluetooth) and tootle your Bluetooth flute…
First up, I’d like to say: Nice to see you back. I was wondering how you were doing. Glad to know you’re hanging in there. You still in COVID-central? Um, I mean CA?
I must admit all of this is way over my head. I am going to have to take some time to digest it all. Thank you for the link. I will do some reading, and see if I can make sense of this.
We had a vintage synth at the shop, so I brought it home to try. I know the aftertouch won’t work on it. I had a friend of mine who used to run Western Canada’s division of Roland check for me. The synth is a Roland E-86. It is in great shape, and everything works on it. So at least this is a start. Today my first job will be to get it set up and running through my keyboard amp. Until now I haven’t even had this.
I figured it would come in handy should things open up again, since I often use keyboard players for my jazz band that only have electric pianos. This way we can rehearse at my place, and even use this synth for the shows if need be.
I’m off to my studio now. Fingers crossed… Wish me luck…
I should also add that if you can get your hands on the software that comes with the EWI USB, you can use the actual synth software even though you obviously won’t be able to use the stuff that customizes the EWI. I can say from experience that there’s no copy protection attempted, I guess they assumed nobody would bother copying it if they don’t have the hardware.
To use the breath data, you need a synth that responds to it. Fortunately, I have some to offer although they are not saxophones — pan pipes, two flutes, and clarinet are all I’ve done thus far.
The list of the instruments I have made thus far is at https://docs.google.com/document/d/15XBK9LqTsNRG14JD23bidiAvaEaj8UXcT8O8PDTnS3o and the instrument you want in this particular case is “Party Pipes”.
If you are pleased with the general result, then you are exactly the type that should look into Mr. Sax T or the full Sax Brothers suite. That is a level of sophistication I will not be able to reach, because it uses features available in Kontakt that are not in ARIA (which is what my instruments are written for). Mostly, Kontakt allows “flute vibrato” done with wavering breath to be converted into actual pitch vibrato on the fly, and ARIA has no provision for doing this, hence why I chose instruments that are not typically reliant on vibrato for expression.