Product Engineers
Charles Walter was a pillar in the piano business for nearly 60 years. He was hired by the C.G. Conn Company to work in the piano design department back in 1964. While there he worked under the legendary Dr. Earle Kent, the Director of Research and Engineering. When the company decided to...
Jess Oliver was the inventor of the Ampeg Baby Bass, the first electronic upright bass instrument. The fiberglass body and unique design was key to projecting the sound of a double bass into an electric amplifier. His idea was one of the many used by the Ampeg Company. When the Baby Bass was...
Will Alexander worked for Oberheim in the heyday of the synthesizer boom of the 1970s. He helped engineer the Oberheim Four Voice System as well as the popular OB-X units. He soon realized the role computers could play in music making and by using the early Apple products he began engineering...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Alberto Kniepkamp engineered many of the electronic organs produced by the Lowrey Organ Company in the 1970s and 80s. Alberto took an active role in the development of the MX1 Lowrey Organ, which was introduced at the NAMM Show in 1979. The product was one of many engineered by Alberto, who began...