Casio DHorn

Music for the Highveld

The Casio DH 500 Digital Horn (Dhorn)
Iain Cameron - one of the kwase-kwaza site developers - uses the Casio Dhorn in many of the CDs he produces. Here, he gives a description of the Dhorn together with how he uses it. There are also some samples you can listen to together with some of his compositions that incorporate the Dhorn.
	Basic layout The Dhorn is a synthesizer that you blow - an electronic wind instrument or EWIs. Akai, Yamaha and Casio are some of the Japanese firms have developed EWIs . The DH500 is as far as I am aware the top of the Casio range has and never been sold in Europe. It looks like plastic toy saxophone.
Like many wind instruments, the Dhorn has a mouthpiece at one end that you put in your mouth and blow down. The harder you blow, the louder the note that emerges from the speaker in "bell" of the saxophone. It has keys and these work more or less on the Boehm flute system or the standard saxophone pattern.
	At the side of the instrument there is an on/off switch, a rotary control for volume and a rotary control for reverberation. There is a minijack output socket for taking the onboard sounds eg to a mixer or amplifier and most important of all a five pin MIDI out socket. There is also a mains in socket of you don't want to run it from the internal 6 AA batteries At the back of the instrument is an eight position switch which selects the instrument voice - a clarinet, a flute and a set which sound like soprano tenor or baritone saxophones although the are one or two different names on the positions.
	There is a vibrato on/off switch and tuning adjustments - both fine tunings and semitone steps. At the side of the instrument on the left hand side is a switch which brings on portamento and at the back there are octave buttons to be worked with the thumb. MIDI As a MIDI device the Dhorn will send instructions to other synthesizers and to sequencers. I use mine with a Casio synth which like the Dhorn was also developed in the 1980s - the CZ101 - which has a lot of external controls so that it is easy to change settings in mid performance. The portamento on/off also works neatly between these two devices. The CZ101 has a set of sounds of the kind that inspired the techno pioneers in Detroit. I also use it with an Yamaha XG sound box but I have to control the settings in the sound box from a PC through XG control software and a MIDI switch. Yamaha XG has a great range of sounds effects within it.
I have just bought a Roland MIDI/USB converter and so now I can use the Dhorn to input notes directly into Cubase running on my portable, editing and developing what I play using the score editor, cut and paste etc. So overall, if you are someone who is less happy with a piano keyboard and more comfortable with wind fingerings and phrasing, the Dhorn is an ideal instrument for electronic and digital music making.		Samples Click here to listen to some samples of the Dhorn.
Special effects On almost all conventional wind instruments you have to work hard at keeping in tune especially in quieter passages when there is a tendency to play flat and loud ones where the opposite happens. This is not a problem with the Dhorn which is a great plus.
When you are working through MIDI driving an external sound generator and also using onboard sounds, eg sax and organ playing in unison, there can be interesting opportunities when the note-on messages don't quite work in the same way on the two devices. Its hard to describe what these amount to. If you are used to playing jazz and blues then these effects can be additions to the repertoire of "funky" tricks that are used to roughen up phrases. After a little practice you begin to exploit this expanded repertoire as second nature.
As far as the analogue output from the Dhorn is concerned a wide variety of guitar effects - distortion, amp simulation, reverb, delay, autowah, echo, chorus etc - can be effective. For example its quite easy to get a solo sound quite close the overdriven Leslie cabinet that blues organists used in the mind 60s. Long delay repetition can be pretty good fun too. And of course with an overdriven amp simulation and loads of extra middle its possible to sound like a lead guitarist letting rip through humbucking pickups.

Music Tracks
Track 1	Track 1 is a group effort. The original piece was created by Mark Graham (and an accomplice) on a BBC500 computer many years ago. Robin Frederick added some beats a year or so ago and then Gilbert Isbin played some acoustic guitar. I added some Dhorn - fairly prominent in this mix - sounding pretty much like a saxophone.
Track 2	Track 2 was recorded in a single take using the DHorn and two Casio synthesizers - the CZ101 and a GM sound module - to create a thick single line. The occasional second part was added directly through the CZ101 keyboard using my right hand while my left hand continued to play the horn.
Track 3	Track 3 is one of the experiments that Gilbert Isbin and I made during 2003. The main Dhorn contribution is towards the end of the piece where it is used on a soprano saxophone setting driving an automatic wha-wha on a Behringer Vamp amplification simulator.
Track 4	Track 4 is a piece made at the time of the Iraq War by Gilbert Isbin and myself with a CZ101 basic track. Gilbert plays the acoustic guitar through a fuzzbox and the Dhorn plays the basic tune derived from a Bob Dylan song which suited the times.
Track 5	Tracks 5 and 6 are two versions of another short piece that Gilbert and I wrote in 2003 - the Dhorn takes the tune on soprano sax and then on clarinet setting.
Track 6
Track 7	Track 7 is based on the piece that Stravinsky wrote in 1919 to mark the death of his friend Debussy. The Dhorn is used to drive several different synth voices at the same time. This piece is from Serious Music for the Highveld CD.
Track 8	Track 8 is from Highveld Easter Plunderfonix CD and is a Gilbert Isbin piece which acoustic flute and then Dhorn improvisation.
Track 9	Track 9 is also from Highveld Easter Plunderfonix - the Dhorn takes the lead. It is slightly chorussed and improvises at length over some Northern European beats in a polytonal style.
Track 10	Track 10 is another from Plunderfonix. It is based on one of the Dances Universal Peace which Regan von Schweitzer introduced me to. The tune is a chant which usually has words taken from a Sufi text. The Dhorn appears as a baritone sax and also as the main melody instrument. Using MIDI the horn plays through the CZ101 on a electric piano setting and this sends an analogue signal to a Yamaha rhythm box which has automatic harmonisation - so one of the organ parts is automatically harmonised from the top line.