Let’s take a brief moment to talk about this Casio SA-76 44-Key Mini Personal Keyboard.
Description
It’s a small electronic keyboard with 44 smallish keys, a black top with lots of buttons, and an LCD display. The bottom is orange. It can run on power from the AC adapter or from internal AA batteries.
Narrative
So, yeah, this thing. When I was a kid I had a keyboard but it had full-size keys (and more of them), better sounds, and some kick ass demos. It was big and bulky and took D size batteries. It was more of an instrument/synth/sequencer than a toy. This is a toy.
Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), I don’t play with it. It belongs to the kiddos. One of the older’s favorite things to do is to turn on the endless demo loop mode and dance around to the music and then forget about it and go do something else and leave it on across the room and why do I have to get up and turn it off and why is this music so annoying can’t it just stop automatically and how are the batteries lasting this long?!
Functionality
It is a polyphonic synth with 10 instrument sounds and 50 accompaniment/rhythm options. It has 10 demo songs which you can play in a loop or select individually and enable/disable the melody so you can theoretically play along. But anyone who has developed the skill to play along will probably want to play other things; I’d just rather use my professional keyboard.
Quality
It’s a bit on the cheap side and all plastic. It’s about what you’d expect for a kid’s musical keyboard toy.
Reliability
Well, it works and keeps on going on a single set of AA batteries longer than you’d expect. I’m not sure whether to classify the following single problem as reliability or durability, so I’ll put it in the latter:
Durability
The only thing so far is that the volume slider is flaking out. The oldest will turn it on and turn it up and wonder why no sound is coming out. I figured out that you have to press down a bit on the volume slider to make it work. Maybe I should have not figured that out.
Conclusion
I’m of the mind that musical instruments should be real and not toys. But this may be a way to get a child interested in music, or at least give them something to bang on to keep them away from your real keyboard. I wouldn’t buy one of these for myself, but it’s useful enough for children that I might consider it. As it was a gift, I’d like to look at other options first.