Tom Oberheim was born in Manhattan, Kansas in 1936. In junior high school, he started building HiFi amplifiers for friends probably based on the same articles in Popular Mechanics that his contemporaries Bob Moog (1934) and Don Buchla (1937) were reading. He was also listening to a lot of Jazz music ...
Roger Linn was born in Whittier, California in 1955. Roger learn to play guitar growing up in the 1960s and when he was in high school, he started messing around with electronics. While in high school I modified a fuzz tone product called the Foxx Tone Machine with some simple filters to make it s...
Acknowledgement of the people who made these articles possible Before we dive into the history of the creation of MIDI, we wanted to acknowledge the key people who made this official history of the birth of MIDI possible. These are people who were directly involved with the creation of MIDI in its early days. Some of these pe...
Analog Synths, Drum Machines, and Sequencers In the last chapter of the history of MIDI, we covered the early history of electronic musical instruments, the period from 1900 to 1963. By the mid 1960's thanks to the work of Bob Moog, Alan Pearlman and Don Buchla, the concept of electronic Synthesizers, Drum Machines and Mu...
The first electronic musical instruments As electricity became more widely available, the early 20th century saw the invention of electronic musical instruments including the Telharmonium, Trautonium, Ondes Martenot, the Theremin and the Hammond organ. What is interesting in looking at these early devices is how much they foreshadow the future...
From mechanical to digital to virtual....and back! The relationship between mechanical musical machines and MIDI gets even more intriguing with orchestrions and "fairground organs". Orchestrions have multiple mechanical instruments in them and are designed to sound like a complete orchestra (hence the name). Orchestrions a...
To really understand the origins of MIDI, you need to go all the way back to before there were digitally controlled synthesizers and computers, In fact you need to go back before there was even electricity to the very first mechanical music machines. The very first mechanical musical instruments were documented in the Book of Ingenious Devices...
The golden age of mechanical music machines really came in the late 19th century and early 20th century with player pianos and orchestrions. A player piano is defined as any actual acoustic piano that is played by a pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanism that operates the piano action via pre-programmed music. Between 1910 and 1...
If you were forced to pick one single person who is responsible for the creation of the modern music production environment, Bob Moog would be a good choice. He spans the era from the early days of synths to the post MIDI world and is arguably the most influential figure in synth history. In researching...
This 30 minute TV show from 1986 is a window into the state of the art in MIDI music technology back then. Guests: Chris French, Music Software; Bob Moore, Hybrid Arts; David Schwartz, Compusonics; Chris Potter, Mimetics; Curtis Sasaki, Apple; Gary Kildall, Digital Research; Gary Leuenberger, Midi RevolutionProducts/Demos: Casi...
