Large Japanese manufacturer of a wide variety of consumer electronics devices. In electronic music, Casio is noted mainly for the phase distortion synths it produced in the 1980s, although it has produced over 100 different models of personal keyboard devices since 1980, and these do sometimes find their way into recordings.
Casio got its start in 1946. Its first product was a cigarette holder. A few years later, the company got into building electromechanical adding machines and desk calculators; like other such machines of the era, these used gears and wheels, and were powered by either a motor or a hand crank. In the '50s, the company set about to build a calculator with no moving parts other than relays, and it introduced its first such device in 1957. All-solid-state calculators followed in the 1960s, and by 1975 the company had an extensive line of pocket calculators of various levels of sophistication. Other electronic products such as hand-held games, digital watches, and early versions of digital cameras.
Casio moved into music electronics with the first of its personal keyboards, the Casiotone 201, in 1980. Soon after, the company embarked on a project to produce a large synth combining several digital technologies, for electronic musician Isao Tomita; the result was the Cosmo system. The Cosmo served, among other things, to prototype phase distortion synthesis, a synthesis method Casio had developed that was implementable at a reasonable cost with early-1980s technology. The first commercial product to use phase distortion synthesis, the CZ-101, appeared in 1984, and at a list price of under $500 US, it put Casio on the electronic music map. A series of other models based on phase distortion synthesis followed over the rest of the decade, and then the company introduced the VZ-1, which used a mix of phase distortion and true frequency modulation synthesis, at the end of the decade.
However, by the early 1990s, Casio seemed to have lost interest in the professional music market. This period was dominated by samplers, and Casio chose not to update its FZ-1, introduced in 1987. By about 1993, all professional synths had been dropped from Casio's product line. The company re-entered the synth market with the XW-P1 and related products in 2012, but these were discontinued by 2020. As of September 2021, Casio is not manufacturing any professional synthesizers per se, although it does market certain high-end model personal keyboards, such as the WK-7600, as "crossover" products for the professional market.