Synthesizers
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...
Marvin Jones is the founding editor of Polyphony, an early and important magazine covering the growth and development of the synthesizer industry and its many innovators and leaders. Marvin talked of his wonderful background in music, going back to his father who was a designer and creator of...
Tom Oberheim is the inventor of the first polyphonic music synthesizer, who played a vital role in the establishment of MIDI standards back in the early 1980s. The Oberheim Company created a long list of innovative products, which remain sought-after as vintage instruments including the Oberheim 4...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...