Keyboards
Jack Hotop was among the innovative engineers at KORG during the early synthesizer craze, creating the first MIDI workstation, the KORG M1. During his long career at KORG, Jack has teamed with fellow engineer Jerry Kovarsky who later became product manager. Together they lead the team that created...
Bryan Bell was given the task of engineering a working synthesizer using all of Herbie Hancock’s favorite keyboards back in the early 1970s, well before MIDI. Herbie’s single instruction to Bryan was that he wanted all of the sounds of his 20 plus instruments powered and fully controlled by one...
Jerry Kovarsky was the product/brand manager at KORG for over 15 years. Working with Jack Hotop they were part of the team that created a long line of innovative synthesizer products for KORG, including the Triton, the Oasys, and more recently the M3 and the Kronos. Jerry played a vital role in...
Brian Vincik was in the right place at the right time. As a synthesizer enthusiast and engineer, Brian graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 1979 and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when many of the most innovative synthesizer companies were designing new musical products. Brian became...
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...
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...
Roger Linn forever changed the way people dance! As the inventor of the electronic Linn drum machine, he ushered in the new wave of electronic dance music beginning in the 1980s. The Linn drum machine also brought new meaning to the term “re-mix” and opened up a new era of sampling for club dj’s...
Mark Vail has preserved some of the music products industry’s greatest history as author and researcher of a series of publications. In 1993, BackBeat Books published Mark’s landmark book Vintage Synthesizers. Four years later the same publishers released his The Hammond Organ: Beauty in the B....
Karl Hirano was an electronic engineer for Yamaha in Japan during the great MIDI boom of the early 1980s. In fact, Karl was a member of the team that gathered at the 1983 NAMM Show to discuss the MIDI spec and agree on the protocol and how MIDI would be engineered into the vast number of new...
Chris Meyer grew up during the dawn of the synthesizer and wanted to both play and create electronic music. He earned a degree in engineering to pay for his hobby never realizing he could apply both passions as an electronic engineer. He began work at Sequential Circuits in 1984 just as Dave Smith...