Keyboards
Lester Abrams is the songwriter who teamed up with Michael McDonald to pen the Doobie Brothers hit "Minute by Minute." As a teenager and playing drums, Lester's first band was the El Doradoe. He later switched to keyboard and after playing with a few other bands landed in the innovative band...
Enrico Monaci loved to hear the stories of his uncle, who started the ORLA Company to make parts for accordions. The company expanded over the years and Enrico grew up helping in every element of the business. During the 1950s they began making reed organs and within a decade the company created...
Suzanne Ciani played a key role in the early awareness and usage of electronic musical instruments into pop music, film and even the stage. She was experimenting with electronic musical instruments long before many other performers, male or female. When she began composing on the Buchla...
Ryo Okumoto began his professional musical career as a keyboardist during the height of the electronic musical instrument boom of the 1970s. The synthesizer was growing nearly every month and new sounds were being created at nearly every NAMM Show, an opportunity Ryo-san took full advantage of as...
Tadahiro Sato loved music and baseball! In fact after playing baseball for many years in his youth, he joined the music industry while playing baseball all along. His sister's husband established Star Music in Japan in 1950, where Tadahiro began working four years later. He and his brother-in-...
Isao Tomita was the world-renowned composer of electronic music who famously used the Moog synthesizers to create award winning music that influenced a generation of music makers! Among his most incredible contributions to music was his use of multitrack recordings to create polyphonic...
Akio Hiyoshi was on the engineering team at Yamaha in 1959 that designed the Electone Organ, which brought the small piano manufacturer into the electronic musical instrument market, where they would become dominant for decades. The team also worked on the Clavinova, the CS 80 (Yamaha's last...
Hirokazu Kato took part in the innovative engineering team at Yamaha in Japan who utilized FM Synthesis to create an electronic musical instrument, first the TRX prototype and then the revolutionary DX7. Kato-san began his career with Yamaha in 1965 when he helped design the company's first...
Don Airey is widely known as the current keyboardist for Deep Purple, a gig he has had since 2002. His career spanned the development of electronic instrumentation, which grew as his own career did over the years. In his early work with Gary Moore, Don played the Wurlitzer electric piano, which...
Dan Rodowicz was encouraged at an early age to play music. His parents arranged piano lessons, which led to trombone, which was the instrument of his beloved uncle. Dan was influenced by the music around him growing up in Philadelphia, which inspired him to play the organ. In 1976 he won a local...