Musician and score composer Michael Andrews featured a circuit bent SK-1 heavily in the Me and You and Everyone We Know musical score. The synthesizer was one of the first pieces of equipment that Autechre had when they began recording music. It became very popular in the late 1990s among the circuit bending crowd after the first guide to bending it was published by Reed Ghazala in Experimental Musical Instruments magazine, though the SK-1 was being modified as early as 1987 when Keyboard Magazine published an article on adding MIDI support. The SK-1 has been used by a few major recording artists for its simplicity and lo-fi sound. The SK line continued throughout the late 1980s, including the SK-2, SK-5, SK-8 and 8A, SK-10, SK-60, SK-100, SK-200, and SK-2100.

The Radio Shack version of the Casio SK-1 is called the Realistic Concertmate 500.

Ĭasio SK-1 (fore) with the Realistic Rap-Master (rear). The SK-1 includes one pre-arranged piece of music, the Toy Symphony, which is played when the 'Demo' button is pressed. The SK-1 was thus an unusually full-featured synth in the sub-US$100 (equivalent to $250 today) home keyboard market of the time. It also includes a rudimentary sequence recorder, preset rhythms and chord accompaniment. It also features a small number of four-note polyphonic preset analog and digital instrument voices, and a simple additive voice.Īll voices may be shaped by 13 preset envelopes, portamento, and vibrato. It has 32 small sized piano keys, four-note polyphony, with a sampling bit depth of 8 bit PCM and a sample rate of 9.38 kHz for 1.4 seconds, a built-in microphone and line level and microphone inputs for sampling, and an internal speaker and line out. The Casio SK-1 is a small sampling keyboard made by Casio in 1985.

Concertmate 1000 keyboard manual