Composer/Songwriter
Bill Mays can balance composing, arranging and piano performance with the best of them. As a young musician in San Diego, he cut his teeth on jazz and went on to become a pioneer in the use of synthesizers in the Hollywood studios as early as 1969. With a love of vocal arranging, Bill has worked...
Morton Subotnick composed one of the earliest and most important works of electronic music. When his album “Silver Apples of the Moon” was released in the late 1960s, it represented an entirely new era of composition. Years before the recording, he hired inventor and engineer Don Buchla to create a...
Val Eddy was a legendary vibraphonist and composer who played a large part in the early acceptance of the vibraphone in classical music and popular recordings. With his trusty 1922 Leedy vibraphone, Val composed and arranged a number of important books for the instrument including the renowned “...
Hugh Martin was a great American songwriter who teamed with Ralph Blane at the end of the golden age of Tin Pan Alley to give us such classics as “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “The Trolley Song” and “The Girl Next Door.” As a tunesmith, Hugh worked on Broadway, for the movies, and as...
Craig Anderton was among a very small group of engineers at the dawn of the synthesizer revolution during the 1970s that was in the position to report, educate and compose music based on this new technology as it was being created. His monthly articles for Keyboard magazine have become a historic...
Herbert Deutsch was down in Robert Moog’s basement when the two men were redrafting the design of an electronic synthesizer in the early 1960s. Herb suggested that the modular unit with patch cords was hard to play as a musical instrument and wondered if it could be controlled by an organ-type...
Jeff Rona played a critical role in the coming together of the minds and companies that would agree on the MIDI specs back in the 1980s. The meetings took place at NAMM shows over several years and included Dave Smith, members of Yamaha and Roland to name a few. Jeff was the founder and past...
Paul Johnson formed one of the early surf bands in Southern California during the golden era of instrumental music. As a guitarist and songwriter, Paul performed and recorded in the days before the Beach Boys, when it was common for an instrumental recording to be on the Top Ten lists. Over the...
Eddie Holland gained worldwide fame as a Motown Record’s songwriter and music publisher along with his brother Brian. Eddie was also a recording artist who performed the chart-topping hit “Jamie” in the early 1960s. During the same time he penned a string of hits for some of the biggest names in...
Brian Holland and his brother Eddie are among the most popular songwriting teams in the history of popular music! For decades they have created the words and music to Motown’s classic sound that has forever changed the way people dance, fall in love and celebrate life. The key to their success as...