List Of Vintage Casio Portable Recording Studio

Sounds like fun to meand the best thing is, youre never too old to buy one of these vintage musical machines and play with them, even today. (Photo: Sarah Wickliffe).

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Its there at every major social event, and our drive to understand, create, and enjoy it seems baked into our prehistoric DNA.

Humans have been making music for tens of thousands of years with every material we possibly could: bones and animal skins, horsehair and wood, metal and reeds, and eventually, electronics.

With advances in integrated circuit design and analog and digital synthesis techniques, it was possible to make a tiny, battery-powered multi-voice instrument with no internal moving parts by the late 1970s.

In 1980, Casio produced its first electronic keyboard, the CT-201, and over the next decade and beyond, continued to innovate with inexpensive home keyboards for the average consumer.

Of course, there are so many out there that this is only a tiny slice of Casios musical history.

After youre done reading, Id love to hear about your personal history with electronic keyboards in the comments.

Introduced that year for around 100, the Casio PT-80 was hailed as a technological marvel in the 1985 edition of Songwriters Market.

A couple friends also received PT-80s that same Christmas (that never happened again), which leads me to believe it may have been the most popular home keyboard of the 1980s in America.

The PT-80 presented the user with a simple feature set only a button press away; its limitations made it ideal for kids.

You could select eight different instruments and play along (monophonic only, which means one note at a time) with a backing rhythm track and special chord keys.

It could also play pre-programmed music from interchangeable ROM packs that could be purchased separately.

Photo: Casio).

I could imagine taking this to the beach and playing along to all the latest new wave hits of the day, surely impressing everyone around.

Right after refining a melody on the VL-1, you could use the same tiny white buttons on the front to do your taxes.

Considering its age, it didnt sound that impressive, but its dinky sounds proved more of an asset than a hindrance, with several artists (most notably the German group Trio with Da Da Da ) using the VL-1s cute and funky rhythm section in their songs.

This one actually predates the CK-200 seen above by a year, and it includes detachable speakers and way more knobs and faders.

List Of Vintage Casio Portable Recording Studio

Casio marketed the KX-101 as a portable recording studio, allowing players to record their synthesized compositions right there on cassette tape in the very same machine.

Its very rare today, so if you find one, you have a real treasure on your hands.

Coming from earlier units like the PT-80, the SK-1 represented a huge leap in synthesizing quality and features, including better instrument sounds, sound modeling, and four note polyphony (you could play four notes at a time, which you need for playing chords).

Most amazingly, the SK-1 can record 1.4-second, 8-bit audio samples at 9.38KHz via a built-in microphone (or a mic input jack) and play them back at many different pitches as you play the keys on the keyboard.

Its quite possibly the most fun home synthesizer a kid could have, even today.

Photo: Thomas Sanderson).

It has a soft-touch foil keyboard that is effectively flat, and it produces some respectable analog rhythm sounds as well as eight distinctive lead instruments (piano, electric piano, organ, pipe organ, harp, accordion, clarinet, and violin).

In a time shortly after Ice Ice Baby and U Cant Touch This drove rap into the mainstream in a huge way, Casio created this rap-themed synth with a built-in scratch pada gray plastic disc you could jiggle to get four different scratch sounds.

It even included a microphone you could use to manipulate the pitch of your voice.

Sounds like fun to meand the best thing is, youre never too old to buy one of these vintage musical machines and play with them, even today.

Photo: Sarah Wickliffe).