The Casio keyboard is crucial to the Woodentops sound. In 1982, poverty meant cheap instruments were essential in the early days. Influences would be artists such as Kraftwerk with their sequenced expensive Moogs. The first battery powered tiny Casio MT-31 Keyboards arrived 1982. Rolo bought one and wrote his first songs with it and found that the tone of his voice worked perfectly with it. This was the first model after the monophonic calculator and keyboard. On receiving their first budget in 1984 the band bought a Casio 101. They used that and a 202 bought in 1985. The silver model with a few new tones. These are classic keyboards with a sound unique to themselves. Alice was the original 'girl on the Casio'. For two years the 202 was in contstant touring use, with a distortion pedal and an amp. For recordings such as "it will come" the casio was layered using several tones at once. Bounced and rebounced to make a timeless warm wall of fuzzy melody. Woodentops used nearly all the tones except "Frog". All the singles and albums up untill "Wooden foot cope on the highway" are pure Casio. Straight or effected. As of 1987 the Casio sounds were sampled and put onto an Emax sampler. This meant the Casio and all the new samples for the new material could be all on one keyboard. In 2006 when the band reformed Rolo searched hard to find another casiotone 101, finally locating one in a gospel church in Pennsylvania USA on Ebay. When it arrived it caused the same ooh's and aah's as the original 101 in 1984. With the Woodentops, there are thousands of choices of 'sounds' but the Casio is usually king. Finally in 2006 the band used the "Frog" tone, recording straight from the internal loudspeaker recording "Stay out of the light" acoustically for BBC 6 Gideon Coe show. The Casio Fz1 sampler was used for Benny's Staples drumkit. It had a good crisp sampling quality. Benny had Mercedes Benz hubcaps each with a trigger to the Fz1, plus pads and whatnot.