OH Taxonomy
Dominic Milano played an important role in the history of the music products industry as editor of Keyboard magazine beginning in the 1970s and into the 1980s. It was Dominic’s article of MIDI that first shed light on the inner workings of the development of MIDI and the issues that faced the...
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...
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...
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...
This video is of our annual NAMM Tribute, created in honor of our members and music industry friends who passed away in 2004 and early 2005. This Tribute was shown for the first time at the NAMM Show in Anaheim, California in January 2005.
Leonardo Baldocci is the President of EMD Music, Inc., a European music wholesaler and distributor that specialize in guitars, drums and percussion instruments, wind instruments, cymbals and accessories. EMD is located in Brussels and sells products to more than 2500 music retailers via two...
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....
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...
Dave Smith was the founder of Sequential Circuits and inventor of the polyphonic synthesizer, the Prophet 5. Dave was also the designer and original pioneer of MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) technology. Dave became a part of an active group of innovators in the San Francisco Bay Area...