Casio: The secrets behind making keyboards sound, and feel like the real thing!

“It is different, it is unique, and people are not used to seeing a piano in this harmonious mustard colour.”

Since the launch of the Casiotone keyboard in 1980, the electronic keyboard has become a popular addition to our homes. A more affordable and portable option to the classic piano, it opened up an exciting new era of musical expression to a generation of consumers. Although they started out making calculators and watches, they have since sold over 100 million musical instruments. Their latest model, the PX-S7000 in “harmonious mustard” from the Casio Privia range, is not only going down a storm with musicians but it’s also a thing of beauty winning design awards for its unusual look.

Neil Evans is the Electronic Music Division of Casio in the UK and Ireland. He tells us about the cultural impact and evolution of the casio keyboard… and also plays us some tunes. Find out from Neil how the sound samples have evolved over the years, how their dedication to detail makes playing the keyboard a truly sensory experience, and why that sleek and lightweight design is so important.

We also hear from Brian Thompson, who heads up PTC’s CAD division. He explains how Casio uses Creo to further develop its Privia range in terms of ECAD-MCAD collaboration, and how the software helps the company to balance the electronic and mechanical aspects of the design. This is especially important with customers placing more and more emphasis on aesthetics.

Find out more about Casio here.

Find out more about CREO here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC.

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates.

Third Angle is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Ollie Guillou and Clarissa Maycock. Location recording by Hannah Dean. And music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, where we’re switching on demo mode and making music accessible to everyone.

I’m your host, Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical, and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world, each powered by PTC technology. 

The piano is the most popular instrument in the world, but owning a piano isn’t within the grasp of everyone. As well as being expensive, they can take up a lot of space and add up to 200 kilos – getting them up flights of stairs is notoriously difficult. Thanks in large part to the launch of the Casiotone electronic keyboard in 1980, we all got the opportunity to bring an affordable, portable alternative into our homes. Since then, the company has sold over 100 million musical instruments. Casio keyboards have become so popular over the years that many famous musicians, like Gary Barlow, have credited their starting music to them. Plus, they’ve given birth to some of pop’s most well-known songs such as Pulp’s smash hit Common People, which Jarvis Cocker wrote shortly after getting his new Casio keyboard home. 

To find out more, our producer Hannah Dean travelled to Casio’s office in Wembley, London. She met with Neil Evans, who heads up the electronic music division of Casio in the UK and Ireland. He told her more about the company, and of course, played her a few tunes on a PX-S7000 model from the Casio Privia range.

I’ve been a gigging musician, I’ve been a piano teacher, I’ve played piano in restaurants, I’ve been in a band touring across the UK and Europe, and now I’ve ended up basically running the EMI division, which is the electronic musical instrument division, at Casio looking after the UK and Ireland. Casio was started by four brothers in Japan. And that was back in 1957. Their ethos was to make products that are useful for everyday life. Their very first major product was the first electronic calculator, and that was in 1957. Prior to that, calculators used pulleys and levers and motors, and very large systems to do these basic sums. But this was the first electronic device that could do it easily and quickly. Now, we say it was compact, it was the size of a fridge freezer at the time, but it was a game changer in order to do those maths calculations. 

Casio has made many different products in lots of different fields over the years; it was in the 70s that they started to make electronic watches. But the journey from that very first calculator has included things like digital cameras – we were first to market with the first consumer digital camera. It wasn’t until 1980 that started the journey into musical instruments. One of the brothers had a real passion for music. In 1984, musical instruments at the time, you could either buy very complicated, big synthesisers or big, bulky home organs with two manuals and pedals. So the idea with the first keyboard was make something small, compact, with a speaker built in, that anybody could use. And it was a really simple operation that was called the CT-201, the Casio 201, and that was in 1980. Since then, we’ve sold over 100 million instruments and they’ve taken various different shapes and sizes over the years.

Okay, so we’re sat in front of the PXS-7000. This is the latest in our Privia range. It’s a very modern and contemporary-looking piano. And you’ll see we have the full 88 black and white keys here. It’s a very shortened slim design, and the control interface is completely touch, just like on a tablet or an iPhone. And it sits on a very stylish four-legged stand. There’s been a real focus on this range of pianos in terms of the way they look, and also the colours that we’ve used. So, traditionally, keyboards and pianos are in black or white, but the design team came up with quite a unique colour. Following a whole load of research, they came up with a unique harmonious mustard finish, and it’s quite a striking, yellowy-green finish. And it stands out in any modern surrounding. And what’s been quite surprising around this, it’s been the number one seller around the world, this colour. It is different, it is unique, and people are not used to seeing a piano in harmonious mustard colour. 

So there’s many, many different piano sounds on the PXS-7000 and they all have slightly different characteristics. Some are mellow, some are brighter, some have some effects on them, so they all vary, and I’m sure you can find something that suits your own personal preference. But I’ll play this standard piano here that when you turn it on it defaults. 

PLAYS TUNE

I would say that that particular piano sound is not too bright and it’s not too mellow. I can give you an example of a brighter piano sound, so we’ll play something a bit more upbeat.

PLAYS TUNE

So the fundamental principles of either electronic keyboard or electronic piano is how it produces sound or reproduces sounds. Now, in the very early days, the sounds that were produced from keyboards or pianos were synthesised, so they were artificial, and the microchips and all the wizardry behind it were creating a sound to emulate the sound of another acoustic instrument. So you would try and get as close to a piano sound as possible, or you would try and get as close to a violin sound as possible, but it was synthesised. Over the years, technology has developed significantly and we’ve moved on to what we now refer to as sampling. So this is the very high-quality digital recording of acoustic instruments. So rather than trying to artificially generate it, what you’re hearing now on our electric pianos or our keyboards is a digital recording of that instrument. So it’s a real audio performance of what was going on on that instrument at the time of recording, so it really is quite remarkable. So for instance, on a piano, we will take a very, high-quality microphone, we will go in and we’ll record every single note individually, but then we’ll record them at different volume levels. So very, very quiet, a little bit louder, loud, very loud, and then almost as hard as you can hit it. And that reproduction in detail in terms of sampling is one of the major shifts that’s happened over the last 35-40 years. So what you’re hearing now is much more convincing. It sounds like a piano, or any other instrument they are sampling. And it means that the user experience is just on another level. 

There’s a really cool thing on this piano where the engineers have replicated piano sounds from famous pieces of music. And they’ve used that by tweaking the EQ, putting various effects on it, to make it sound like famous pieces of music. This one’s called Image Piano. So if I play a little ditty.

PLAYS ‘IMAGINE’ 

So you can guess what that particular piece of music is. And there’s a whole bank of these pianos that have been created to sound like famous pieces.

PLAYS TUNE

Many of our keyboards over the years come with preset sounds and/or rhythms. So, in this particular instance, a rhythm or accompaniment has been composed by somebody else, and it’s been loaded into the keyboard, and they often take different genres. So there might be a jazz element to it, a Latin element, rumba, dance music, etc. And there was a product that we launched in the early 80s called the MT-40. And that particular product had quite an unusual rhythm at the time which had a bit of a reggae feel to it. And it was that rhythm that effectively launched an entire genre of reggae music, and it was referred to as Sleng Teng.

There was a chap called Wayne Smith that used that rhythm to write a piece of music that became very, very popular. And as I said, off the back of that, many, many other songs were produced using that style of rhythm. And yes, the Sleng Teng genre was born. And what’s really quite amazing is the lady that wrote that rhythm all those years ago when she was a young music student at the University in Japan, she wrote that, she knew that it was a bit different, she had got some influences from various rock and roll pieces of music, she is still at the company to this day. She’s very proud of what she wrote when she was young and in her early Casio career, and the fact that it spawned this entire genre of reggae music is an amazing journey.

PLAYS TUNE

So over the years, the touch and feel of keyboards and pianos has changed massively. Trying to faithfully recreate the feel and resistance of an acoustic piano is the ultimate goal. And early digital pianos often used very basic spring mechanisms. Some of them weren’t even weighted, so it would feel very light under your touch. And that’s perhaps one of the key areas that’s developed the most over the last 30 years plus. 

We have teams of engineers that will meticulously go through the design process, looking at how heavy the keys are on an acoustic piano. They will weigh them, they will put pressure sensors on them, and come up with a keyboard, and design a keyboard that, when you’re playing it, not only does it feel as close to an acoustic piano as possible, but it responds like the touch on an acoustic piano. And that allows players to be expressive. So when I say responding like an acoustic piano, if you press the keyboard keys lightly, you are going to get a softer tone and a quieter tone. And gradually, as you increase that pressure and the strength that you hit the keys, the sound is going to get louder. But also, in line with that, if you do that on an acoustic piano and hit the keys really hard, the tone of the piano actually changes as well; it doesn’t just get louder, it becomes more harsh and it becomes brighter. So all of these fine nuances and details have to be taken into account when you’re recreating the sound, but also recreating the feel and touch. 

It’s not just the note that you’re hearing, it’s not just that string, you’ve got the other noises that make up the overall sound of a piano. So you’ve got the hammer noise, the noise of the hammer physically striking the string, you’ve got noises like damper resonance or noises. So if you press the right pedal on an acoustic piano, it lifts all of the felts off the strings. And when you do that, it creates a little sort of zing. And you can hear that on a piano. And we incorporate that into our samples. There’s other nuances around sound called sympathetic resonance. So if you press the right pedal down on a piano, you’ve lifted up all of the dampers off the strings, if you press one note down, it’s oscillating, and that string is vibrating. But so are all of the other strings immediately around it. And you get these resonances and noises that have been sampled as well to incorporate into the overall piano sound. So it’s got to a point where it is so authentic, and the recordings of some of the noises and clicks and the resonances and the pedal noises, we get customers calling us saying, “What is that noise?” And we say, “Well, that’s the noise you’d get on acoustic piano. It’s the noise of the felt dampers being lifted off the string, but they’re being digitally recreated, which takes it to another level.”

The hammer action on this particular piano, the PXS-7000 is a brand new action. It’s the first time we’ve made a hybrid action. So a lot of our actions are made of plastic and counterweights. This is a mixture of resin and wood so it gives it a more authentic feel. So the sides of the keys are actually wood, the tops and the surfaces are resins, and it’s designed to feel and have the look and touch of a traditional wooden acoustic piano action. So, away from the piano sounds, which is where most of the focus has been made, there are other sounds included in the piano as well, such as electric pianos, other acoustic instruments. So I’ll just give you some examples of the electric pianos.

PLAYS TUNE

We’ve got a clav here.

PLAYS TUNE

So within the guitar bank, you’ve got a whole host of guitar sounds. This one’s really nice. It’s a clean nylon guitar.

PLAYS TUNE

I guess if this was being used on stage primarily, it would be piano, or electric piano, and maybe some organs. But depending on the style of music that you’re playing, you might want some string sounds, you might want a synth sound to accompany the band. But also, the idea being all of these instruments can add to whatever you’re doing. So if you’re composing, you can use a whole range of different instruments. So you’ve got bass sounds, you’ve got drums, you’ve got keys, and there is an onboard recording facility as well. So you can multitrack and record yourself playing different instruments and play that back together. So if you’re into songwriting or composing, it’s a great tool to have. It also has a microphone input as well, so you can get that set up. And it also has microphone effects. So reverb, a bit of harmony, and things like that. So makes it an all-round option for musicians. It’s a great piano, it looks amazing, you can record your songs on it, and you can plug a microphone into it as well and perform and sing. 

I think it’s always going to be important for piano players to have a physical product of some sort. Because it’s very much a tactile experience playing the piano. You need to be able to play a piano and get a response back from it. And things like the weighted action and the key bed are integral to playing the piano. So the thought of having just a touchpad with no physical resistance or anything like that, I don’t think that would work for pianists. But in terms of the future development of the piano, we’ve seen it change significantly over the last 40 years, and the digital piano has changed significantly. And what we’re moving into now is really focusing on design and the aesthetics of pianos to fit in with modern lifestyles. Where it goes from here, perhaps into customization, and you can choose the design and the colours to match your decor or living spaces. That’s probably some years off but could be a possibility.

That was Neil Evans, head of EMI at Casio. Now, as Neil was saying, design and innovation has been at the heart of making Casio’s keyboard sound, and the musicians playing experience, authentic as customers place more value on the aesthetics of their pianos. So it’s time to meet our expert Brian Thompson, who heads up PTC’s CAD division, who can tell us more about how the software can help to make beautiful music. 

Brian, we’ve had some innovative Creo guests on previous episodes of Third Angle, from state-of-the-art electric motorbikes to a company that launches satellites into space. Now, Casio are no exception to the world of innovation. With their new, award-winning Casio Privia range, they’ve created a premium instrument that is also a beautiful piece of decor. Now, when it comes to Creo, they use it to further develop the Privia range in terms of the ECAD/MCAD collaboration. Can you perhaps start by giving our listeners an idea of what that means and how it would aid Casio with the design and development of its electric circuit boards?

Yes, sure, I’d be happy to. First of all, I think the product is really cool looking – I love the way they’ve gone about the process of design. It’s extremely compact, looks really cool, and all the settings, and their marketing literature, I think they’ve done a great job with the design of the product. But you could tell, as compact as it is, there’s a challenge there from a mechanical engineering point of view, because there are a lot of ECAD components in that design that has to be integrated really, really well with the mechanical design to get the sound quality they’re looking for, and also to keep the aesthetic that they have for the product. And so, the ECAD word and the mechanical CAD work – in other words, the world of designing boards that carry the electronic components that fit inside the mechanical designs, those two worlds are very, very different. A vast array of components that customers need to pull into their designs off the shelf, and the way circuit boards are designed is very different than the way mechanical hardware is designed, say parts that are machined or moulded or so forth. Very, very different design worlds. And so, it’s not surprising that the two worlds speak very different design languages. Nonetheless, in a design like the Casio Privia, it’s clear that the two worlds need to be able to collaborate very, very carefully. 

The packaging challenges had to have been really, really significant for this product. Thankfully, there’s a standard for the way the mechanical CAD world and the electrical CAD world can communicate. And Creo has abided by that standard for many, many years. What it gives engineers the ability to do is to share an initial design so you can imagine an electrical board design in 3D in the mechanical design environment in Creo. But more importantly, it allows the two worlds to be able to synchronously work across the ECAD and CAD domains, if you will. A mechanical engineer can suggest changes to the position of an electrical component, the electrical engineer can review that change in the board design to see if that change makes sense based upon the packaging needs, and they can go back and forth and hone in on the design that works best – not only for just packaging, but you could imagine things like thermal design and so forth. There are also issues because these electrical components can generate heat, so you’ve got to make sure you can dissipate that heat correctly. And so, we’ve been doing this for many, many years, and it’s great to see a company like Casio take advantage of it. I’m confident that, in their next-generation design, if it’s even better than Privia – which will be hard to beat, it’s a great-looking product – I’m confident they will be even better going forward. So that’s what the ECAD/MCAD collaboration looks like in Creo, and I’m really excited to see how well Casio does with this new product.