A Big Idea, Synthesized

Today in Tedium: In the late 1970s, a man who had changed the business world by turning massive calculators into handheld devices decided that he wanted to scratch another itch. And with that itch scratched, he introduced a world of creativity to bedroom warriors around the country—a set of training wheels to the musically inclined. The devices he created proudly ignored their weaknesses and succeeded despite themselves. And they even inspired pop culture in ways big and small. Today in Tedium, we’re talking about Casio and the tinny electronic music revolution it fostered. You don’t need a backing band; you have a keyboard. — Ernie @ Tedium

(Daniel Oines/Flickr)

How Casio turned its calculator conquests into synthesizer success

In 1979, a calculator came out that seemed to serve multiple masters. It was highly functional, but it served as something of a bridge between Casio’s earliest success stories and the devices that would define the company in the 1980s.

This device, the Casio Melody-80, could do math, clearly, as it was a calculator, but it was also able to work as a stopwatch or an alarm clock. But the real trick, the one that makes it such an impressive artifact of 1979, is that it was able to work as a musical instrument as well—a device that had pre-programmed classical music that could be easily played, as well as the ability to work as something of a synthesizer.

“As you must have figured out by now, the Melody-80 doesn’t confine its genius to strictly serious business,” a Sharper Image ad in an October 1979 edition of Popular Science proclaims. “By flicking the upper right-hand switch, you covert its calculator buttons into music keys, a full 11 note scale from A to D.”

People didn’t need Beethoven with their math—certainly not when it sounded like this, and certainly not from The Sharper Image—but the device was a page-turner for Casio and the company’s primary designer, Toshio Kashio.

Kashio was the second-oldest of the Japanese brothers who founded Casio and the man who played a key role in inventing many of the company’s earliest products. In 1978, Toshio led the company into the electronic music market, with an array of devices that would come to set the stage for the music industry in big ways and small.

See, Toshio was an amateur musician, and in many ways, he saw the problem he was trying to solve as one that involved trying to make an entire world of instruments available to amateur musicians. So instead of building a device that played with waveforms like, say, Robert Moog did, Toshio approached electronic music as a way to create a single device that could play dozens of instruments—including a drum beat, guitars, and melodies. (This approach, as it turned out, was way more palatable to mainstream tastes.)

Toshio was an amateur musician, but could be called a professional patent-filer, with hundreds to his name. One such patent, filed in 1985 but started much earlier, describes the thought process behind the strategy Casio used for its earliest keyboards:

In order to obtain an artificial musical sound wave fairly analogous to its original natural musical sound, not only an analogous musical sound is used but also a volume envelope including factors such as wave rises and wave falls must be superposed on the analogous musical sound. However, there have been no proposals to effectively superpose the volume envelope on the sound wave by the digital technology. The conventional superposition of the volume envelope has been made by the analog technology or by using a complex control circuit. Thus, the musical sound wave formation technique by the digital technology, which is well adapted for fabrication, has not yet been established in this field.

The technology that Casio came up with for some of its earliest keyboards became known as vowel-consonant synthesis, for the similarities the company’s approach had to human speech.

Beyond the Melody-80, Casio came out with a few more synthesizers that could be considered toys, like the Casio VL-Tone, famed for its central place in Trio’s “Da Da Da.” But in 1980, the company released its wood-encased Casiotone 201, the first musical instrument built around sound banks—a big step forward for the company, and for music in general.

It could play an electric guitar, a banjo, a harpsichord, a trumpet, and even a glockenspiel. Unfortunately for Casio, these melodies almost never lived up to their billing—sounding more like distant cousins of a specific sound than an actual tone.

But that proved incredibly valuable for actual professional musicians, who saw the melodies for what they were—a new palette to paint with.

A Casio Rapman. (YouTube screenshot)

As you can tell by the commercials, Casio’s keyboards aimed for Middle America

Casio’s decision to put its energy into sound-bank style keyboards proved fruitful—not only did it make the company a lot of money, but it also gave them a great sales pitch. Here was a device that could let you be your own band.

(Definitely cooler than calculators.)

Once Casio realized it had a massive hit on its hands in the form of the various keyboards it was selling, it marketed them aggressively. One clip advertising the Casiotone MT-100 sells the idea of “The Johnson Five,” a one-man band that can rock it out with a single keyboard:

(Never mind the fact that at the end of the commercial, the clip says multi-track recording was used. Wouldn’t want to ruin the illusion.)

Nearly as good is this clip featuring the Casiotone MT-205 with its optional drum kit attachment.

Clearly, the intended audience for these things was the same audience that was waiting for that awesome A-Ha video to come on again.

Eventually, Casio moved away from the Casiotone series, and tried a variety of different approaches. Casio saw the success Yamaha was having in the professional market and decided that it wanted in—initially having success with the CZ series (likely thanks in no small part to this amazing commercial), but failing to maintain that momentum. Casio eventually started making keyboards for kids that were even simpler than the Casiotones. But eventually, Casio found another hit in the form of the Rapman, which won plaudits from professional reviewers for being fun to use compared to other keyboards of the day, despite the disastrous commercials.

“Listen up: Casio's new Rapman does just about everything a bona fide rap group does,” The New York Times’ Dulcie Leimbach wrote back in 1992, clearly having never heard a bona fide rap group.

But these kinds of tools—toys, really—hold a sort of intrinsic value culturally, the kind that led Toshio Kashio to this idea in the first place.

A lot of creativity was had from that initial spark.