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 sound more like real guitar amp distortion. I sold one to a little-known girl band at the time called Fanny. It apparently failed on stage, causing a news station to come through the P.A. Also during that time I had an after school job installing pickups and electronics in guitars, and had more switches in my guitar than an electronic voting machine in a California governor recall election.

by Roger Linn in an interview for Sonic State

Career as a Songwriter and Guitarist

In 1976 at age 21, Roger went out on tour as a guitarist with the pianist/songwriter Leon Russell. That’s Roger on the left. 

Roger Linn also wrote several hit songs including “Promises” for Eric Clapton in 1979 and “Quittin’ Time” penned with Robb Royer from Bread and covered by a number of people including Mary Chapin Carpenter. 

The first sampled drum machine- the LM-1

Roger was doing well as a songwriter,  but had a simple problem.  He wanted to have realistic drum parts for his songwriting demos and there was nothing that sounded like a real drummer back then. 

Plus he was on the road with Leon Russell and wanted to be able to work on songs in his hotel room.  

So at age 22, he started working on the LM-1. 

Two years later he was ready to announce the first drum machine to use samples- the LM-1. It was Steve Porcaro from Toto who it is rumored to have suggested to Roger that he should look at using real samples in a drum machine.

He started a company called Moffett Electronics with Alex Moffett. The LM in the product name is for Linn and Moffett.

When I would do demos of the early LM–1 prototype, people’s jaws would drop. They were amazed to hear the sound of a real drum when they hit a button. So I knew I was on to something.

by Roger Linn in an interview with Reverb

Life and Love
Leon Russell
1979

Leon Russell is probably not the first name you think of when mentioning synthesists of the 1970s.  

But as we documented in our article about Tom Oberheim, Leon Russell had purchased an ARP 2600 from Tom when Oberheim was the ARP dealer in LA.  

On his album “Life and Love” released in 1979, Leon was the first artist to use a sampled drum machine on a record.

In fact, Roger Linn not only played guitar on the record, he is credited as a co-producer because he wrote the drum parts on the LM-1.  In fact, there is NO drummer on the record so all of the drums were done by the LM-1. 

Credits for the album Life and Love. 

• Leon Russell – guitar, keyboards, piano, vocals – Producer – Written-By
• Roger Linn – Co-producer – drums – Moffett Electronics – Engineer – Guitar
• Marty Grebb – guitar, saxophone
• Jody Payne, Roger Linn – guitar

Here is the title track from Leon Russell’s 1979 album. 

Russell is also given credit by Roger Linn for adding two important features to the LM-1 that would become staples of almost all digital drum machines in the future- Handclaps and a Swing feature.

At first Roger didn’t think handclaps were necessary because you could record them so easily. Russell convinced Roger that after three choruses of hand claps, your hands would be pretty beat up so it would be better to have a consistent recorded sample.

In his NAMM Oral history interview below, Leon Russell talks about how he convinced Roger to add Handclaps ot the LM-1. Russell also talks about admiration for Hal Chamberlin who developed the Mellotron and how Ikutaro Kakehachi, President of Roland came to visit him in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It’s a surprising look at how into technology Leon Russell was. 

It was Leon who taught me about swing timing, which he called ‘shuffle. He explained that one of the big factors in a drummer’s feel was the degree of shuffle timing in his playing. Some drummers played straight sixteenths with a hint of shuffle.

I added the code to delay — by a variable amount — the alternate 1/8 or 1/16 notes, thereby turning a straight beat in a shuffle/swing 1/8 or 1/16 beat and by an adjustable amount. This allowed me to dial in the exact groove I wanted.”

by Roger Linn in his Reverb interview

Getting the LM1 off the ground

Things weren’t easy at the beginning because Roger didn’t have experience in producing products, he was a songwriter and guitarist.  He borrowed $20,000 from his father to help fund the development and when that ran out, he paid the person who designed the printed circuits boards for the LM-1 by giving him Roger’s 12 year old Porsche.

He had a prototype designed, but the exterior case wasn’t ready yet so Linn would haul the LM-1 around in a cardboard box to Hollywood parties and got a number of people including Peter Gabriel, Fleetwood Mac, and Stevie Wonder to put down 50% deposits ($2500) on an LM-1. 

Who recorded the samples for the LM-1

There were many stories about who recorded the samples for the LM-1, but in an August 15, 2017 interview for Reverb by Lou Carlozo, Roger Linn put all the rumours to rest. 

It was a drummer named Art Wood, a good friend of mine with whom I had been in bands. It seems that no matter how many times I tell people that Art played the original drum samples, no one believes it, and they love to create myths. I’ve heard that the original samples were played by Steve Gadd, Jeff Porcaro, Dave Garibaldi, and others, but it was all Art.

by  Roger Linn in an interview for Reverb

Roger Linn Corporate History

Linn Electronics -1980-1986

Linn Electronics released the following products. 

The LM-1- 1980

The LM-2 LinnDrum-1982

The Linn 9000 -Sampling drum machine with a 32 track MIDI hardware sequencer- 1984

The LinnSequencer- Rackmount 32 track MIDI hardware sequencer from the Linn 9000-1985

The LinnDrum MIDI Studio-A sampling drum machine, 32 Track MIDI hardware sequencer and a pad controller  -1986

AKAI MPC 60 and MPC3000

After Linn Electronics, Linn was contacted by the Japanese company Akai and worked to design the MPC60, an integrated digital sampling drum machine and MIDI sequencer released in 1988.

 The MPC60 was followed by the MPC60 MkII and the MPC3000.

All the MPC products had a major influence on the development of hip hop and electronic music and the 4×4 grid of pads was adopted by numerous manufacturers. 

Linn left Akai when the company went out of business in 2005. 

Roger Linn Designs

In 2001 Roger Linn founded a new company, Roger Linn Design. With the help of Dave Smith and Tom Oberheim, Roger developed the company’s first product offering – the AdrenaLinn, a digital multi-effects unit combined with a drum machine and amp modeler.

The AdrenaLinn Series of Products

Select one of the 200 presets, play simple chords or arpeggios in time to one of the drumbeats, and listen as AdrenaLinn III transforms them into looped rhythmic patterns of spiked, swooped, swirled, chopped and mangled tonal variations, inspiring you to new and unexpected compositional ideas. Or simply use a tremolo, flanger or delay that moves in perfect sync to the beat. All the modulation effects you know and love now sync to you. The built-in compression keeps the filter peaks in check, and reverb tops it off.

by Roger Linn Designs

The Tempest
Dave Smith and Roger Linn
2011

Roger Linn and Dave Smith had always remained friends often sharing booth space and traveling to trade shows together. In 2011, they worked together and released the Tempest, a product that used Dave Smith’s vast knowledge of analog synthesis and Roger’s passion for drum machines, beat synched effects and sequencing to bring the world a new take on what a drum machine could be. 

The Linnstrument
Roger Linn and Geert Bevin
2015

At the Winter NAMM show in 2014, Roger introduced his newest design, simply called the LinnStrument. 

Roger had teamed up with Geert Bevin, who has been a major propropent of MPE (MIDI Polyphonic Expression) and is also a member of the  MIDI Association’s Technical Standards Board. 

Roger was a guitarist and had always been frustrated with the limitations of MIDI and the fact that MIDI did not seem capable of expressing all the subtleties of expression that were possible with a six strings. Geert had already worked on many expressive controllers like Eigenharp. 

Together their goal was nothing short of completely re-inventing the MIDI controller.

MPE created a way to get around some of MIDI 1.0’s limitations by using channel rotation so each note could be assigned its own channel and allowing Channel messages like Pitch Bend, Cutoff to be independently controlled for each voice in the Linnstrument. 

In fact, Geert has described MPE as the bridge between MIDI 1.0 and MIDI 2.0 (MIDI 2.0 has Per Note Controllers and Per Note Pitch Bend). 

The LinnStrument is velocity sensitive, grid based MIDI controller that senses three dimensions per finger, polyphonically. It is available in two sizes- 8 by 25 (in the case of the original Linnstrument and  8 by 16 in the case of the slightly smaller LinnStrument 128. 

For more information about Roger Linn and Roger Linn Designs,  please see these excellent resources. 

 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 and when he read an ad in Downbeat Magazine about an LA jazz club you could get into at no charge, he made the decision to save enough money to go to LA.   

He arrived in LA in July of 1956 with $10 in his pocket. 

Of course, he needed to find a job so he applied to be an apprentice draftsman at National Cash Register (NCR).  NCR was a very large company at the time (but would soon become the Blockbuster Video of its era). 

NCR were experimenting with a new brand new technology, computers.  Of course at the time, a computer was not something you put on your lap, it was a room full of large bulky devices.  But computers fascinated Tom and he continued to find jobs in the fledgling computer industry in Los Angeles. Tom Oberheim held a variety of part time jobs in LA between 1956 and 1969.

In 1966 he found a job where they would let him work part time and go to school so he enrolled in UCLA. 

At UCLA, he started studying physics (like Don Buchla) and he would also spend time in the music department (like Dave Rossum). 

That is where he met two people who would change the course of his life. 

Joseph Byrd and Dorothy Moskowitz were in a band called “The United States of America” which had made a couple of records.  When one of the band members quit and took his Ring Modulator with him, Dorothy asked Tom to make the band a new one.   

The experience of designing a Ring Modulator and seeing how musicians used it to create unique tones led to Tom’s fascination with manipulating sound.  

Music Modulator & RM-1

The first commercial product that Tom produced was the Music Modulator which was the result of combining Tom’s experiments with ring modulators with other circuitry to create a device that could be used in live performance. This product was used by a number of contemporary musicians including innovative trumpeter Don Ellis, and experimental composer Richard Grayson, who played the units with Tom in improvised live performance concerts. Tom was asked by the acclaimed film composer Leonard Rosenman to provide a ring modulator for an upcoming movie Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970).

The Music Modulator was also sold by the Chicago Musical Instrument Company (later Norlin Corporation) under the Maestro name as the RM-1.

by Tom Oberheim Website

By 1969, Tom Oberheim was doing contract work designing effects processors for Maestro like the Maestro PS-1A Phase Shifter which was inspired by the Leslie speaker for Hammond organs. 

Having gotten the bug for the musical instrument industry, at the 1971 NAMM show Tom went to the ARP booth and asked Alan Pearlman if he could become the company’s first Los Angeles dealer for the ARP 2600.  

Tom became very familiar with the  ARP 2600 and 2500 synthesizers selling them to musicians like Leon Russell, Robert Lamm, and Frank Zappa. It is amazing how all the founders of the modern music production environment were interconnected and we will see more of those interconnections soon.

Tom realized that the ARP 2500 though more difficult to use then the 2600 could play two notes at the same time which the ARP 2600 could not do so he designed a modification to give the ARP 2600 two note polyphony.  In those days of modular synthesis, two notes of polyphony was a really big deal. 

Tom Oberheim’s practical experience with computer programming led to his next breakthrough product.

The DS2 Digital Sequencer was released in 1973 and was one of the very first digital music sequencers. As it didn’t make any sounds, it was a peripheral to existing modular synths in particular the ARP 2600 that Tom Oberheim was distributing in LA. 

Tom Oberheim’s next product the SEM (Synthesizer Expansion Module) would be significant for several reasons. 

It was the first Oberheim product to make its own sounds (not process sounds from another source).

It was also the first product to bear the Oberheim name. 

Finally it was the first product that was a collaboration with another of the founders of the modern music production environment, Dave Rossum.

All of the pieces were starting to come together.  

Using Dave Rossum’s technology for polyphonic keyboard scanning and Tom’s computer programming experience, Oberheim could now build portable polyphonic synthesizers with different modules for different purposes that would work together.  

By 1977, Oberheim had released Oberheim 2 Voice, the Oberheim 4 Voice and the optional Programming unit.

You could buy a two Voice or 4 Voice synth with a 2 channel voltage controlled sequencer and if you needed Preset storage for use on stage, you could add a programmer module that would digitally store 16 different sound settings. 

Finally there was company offering keyboard players something that had a keyboard, a programmable polyphonic synthesizer with preset program storage and a sequencer in all in one product.  

But the design was bulky and each expander module had to be programmed separately unless you had the Programming unit which could only store 16 sounds. 

The price was also pretty steep coming in at $5700 ($28,000 in today’s dollars!) with the programmer.  

Plus you needed a mixer because each of the expander modules had a seperate audio out. 

Soon the competition (Sequential Circuits) would catch up and lead frog everyone with the microprocessor driven, 5 voice polyphonic, programmable Prophet 5. 

In ten short years, that same concept would add MIDI, ROM based samples and effects and be called the Korg M1 Music Workstation, but that is a story for another day. 

Pictured below is a Oberheim Four Voice with the programmer module from the Horniman Museum

The Oberheim System (a precursor to MIDI)

In Chapter 5 of the History of MIDI, we look at the precursors to MIDI including Control Voltages and Gates, Roland’s Digital Control Bus (DCB), and the The Oberheim Parallel Bus introduced in 1980.  

The Oberheim 37-pin D-SUB connector that allowed the OB-8, The DMX Drum Machine and the DSX Sequencer to connect together into the Oberheim System was one of the inspirations for MIDI and Tom Oberheim was the first person that Ikutaro Kakehachi from Roland reached out to about his dream of a universal digital musical instrument interface.  

Only three short years after the Oberheim System was launched,  Sequential Circuits and Roland would demonstrate MIDI at the 1983 NAMM show. 

Oberheim Corporate History

Oberheim Electronics -1969-1985

Oberheim Electronics released the products listed above as well as the Matrix 12 and Matrix 6 in the early 1980s. 

ECC Oberheim & Gibson buys ECC Oberheim -1985

By May 1985, Oberheim Electronics was struggling the company was taken over by Oberheim’s ex lawyer who promptly sold the company to the Gibson Guitar Company.  

Two years later, Tom Oberheim departed the company he had founded and filed a lawsuit against his ex-lawyer for legal malpractice.

Marion Systems -1987-2000

In 1987, Oberheim formed Marion Systems (named after his daughter Emily Marion) and did consulting work for Roland and Akai.  The company also released the Marion Systems MSR-2, a modular synthesizer concept.

Seasound –2000-2009

In the year 2000 after Marion Systems, Oberheim founded SeaSound, a manufacturer of audio interfaces.

2009-2015

Tom Oberheim returned to hand-building and selling updated SEM synthesizers , but the Oberheim name is still owned by Gibson.

2016- Dave Smith and Tom Oberheim collaborate on the OB-6

Tom designed the VCO and VCF sections and Dave provided the arpeggiator/step sequencer, effects and production capabilities. After 30 years, two of the pioneers of modern synthesis were working together to design new products. 

2019 -Gibson return the Oberheim Electronics name and other intellectual properties to Tom Oberheim

2022 -Oberheim Electronics reopened and Oberheim OB-X8 released

At the 2022 June NAMM show, Oberheim Electronics showcased the new OB-X8.  What was supposed to be a joyous celebration was dampened by the news that just days before the NAMM show, Dave Smith had passed away.   This is a picture from 2019 of Dave Smith, Tom Oberheim, Marcus Ryle (an engineer at Oberheim when still in his teens and founder of Line 6) and Roger Linn. 

For more information about Tom Oberheim and Oberheim Electronics, please see these excellent resources. 

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 people have never been appropriately acknowledged for their contributions and that is one of the reasons for creating this detailed history of how MIDI came about.

Also it became clear in the two years of intense research that went into this article, that MIDI was always about connections and not just connections between products, but more importantly connections between people. There is the well known phrase “it takes village” and MIDI is a great example of how that is true.  MIDI was not developed by two people or two companies,  it was a group of individuals with different backgrounds and motivations who came together to do something for the greater good.

That said, we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge several key people who contributed first person resources and interviews to this article.

John Bowen– Head of sound design for Sequential Circuits, Korg R and D and now President of John Bowen Synth Design, maker of the Solaris synthesizer.

John provided insight into the interconnections between Moog and Sequential as well as multiple interviews on the early days of MIDI.

Hideki Izuchi– Roland Engineer

Izuchi-san created a report about the birth of MIDI that was presented in 2018 at the Japan National Museum of Science in Ueno Park, Tokyo. His incredibly detailed 72 page report entitled “Technical Systematic Survey on MIDI” provided much of the information for this article and confirmed many details from the Japanese side about the development of MIDI.

Jeff Rona– Composer and Founder and first President of the MIDI Manufacturers Association (MMA, now known simply as the MIDI Association)

Jeff provided the MIDI Association access to the very earliest communications of the MIDI Association in its infancy and of course as the very first President of the MIDI Manufacturers Association his contribution (along with Chris Meyer who worked at both Sequential Circuits and Roland and was the first chair of the MMA Technical Standards Board) guided MIDI through its formulative and frankly most turbulent early years.

In researching this article, we realized that the simple story that Roland and Sequential connected a Prophet 600 and a Jupiter 6 together at the 1983 NAMM show and that instantly MIDI became an overnight success was very far from the reality of what was happened between January 1983 and May of 1985 when the MIDI Manufacturers Association was formally created as a non-profit trade association.

Brian Vincek– Vice President at Hewlett-Packard and co-founder of the International MIDI Association

Brian provided access to all of the early files of the International MIDI Association (IMA). Brian and John worked closely in the very early days of MIDI and the IMA was responsible for the distribution of the initial MIDI specification to both MMA companies and individuals. His contributions to the very early days of MIDI were substantial and the files he provided for this article were invaluable.

In researching this article, we realized that the simple story that Roland and Sequential connected a Prophet 600 and a Jupiter 6 together at the 1983 NAMM show and that instantly MIDI became an overnight success was very far from the reality of what was happened between January 1983 and May of 1985 when the MIDI Manufacturers Association was formally created as a non-profit trade association.

Many other people and organizations including NAMM and AMEI provided access to their files and we thank everyone who contributed.

Thanks to those contributions, we believe that this article is the official definitive history of how MIDI got started.

NAMM International Music & Sound Expo
Chicago, Illinois
June 27-30 1981

Ikutaro Kakehachi, President of Roland first approached Tom Oberheim at the June 1981 Chicago NAMM show about the idea for an international industry standard for communication between synthesizers because Oberheim already had the “Oberheim System”, a proprietary system for connecting the Oberheim DSX sequencer, Oberheim DMX drum machine and either OB-8 or OB-Xa synthesizers.

Tom recommends that the Japanese contact Dave Smith from Sequential Circuits as well.

Sequential and Oberheim meet
Los Angeles
late summer 1981

Dave Smith first came down to Oberheim’s office in late summer of 1981 to preview his AES paper to Tom and me and discuss if it could be something Oberheim was interested in.

Although we had a parallel interface solution, we were interested in something that could be more affordable and more universal.

The next meeting Dave and I had was with the Japanese manufacturers during the Gakki fair in Tokyo in mid-October.

This was also before the AES show, and the USI proposal had not yet been released, so our meeting was in secret.

At that meeting there were good discussions about the speed (several of us of the opinion that 19.2Kbaud was too slow, etc.), the data messaging format, connector choices (1/4″ vs DIN vs XLR), and ground loop solutions

by Marcus Ryle

Gakki Fair
Tokyo, Japan
October 15 1981

Dave Smith’s Universal Synthesizer Interface (USI) proposal is discussed at Japan’s Gakki Fair.

Dave Smith, Tom Oberheim and Marcus Ryle met and discussed the proposal with Roland, Yamaha, Korg and Kawai and shared ideas and suggestions.

The Japanese companies agreed to meet about once a month to respond to and improve on Dave Smith’s initial design.

The 2nd Synthesizer Interface Conference
Tokyo, Japan
October 24, 1981

Mieda-san from Korg responds on behalf of the Japanese companies to the meetings at the 1981 Gakki Fair with Sequential and Oberheim and confirms the discussion that were they had at the Gakki Fair.

• 19.2kbps is too slow
• ¼” Jacks will have ground loop problems
• There is no concept of synchronization, clock or the ability to start and stop sequences

The response is sent to Dave Smith of Sequential and forwarded to Tom Oberheim and Marcus Ryle.

Audio Engineering Society
Los Angeles
October 30, 1981

The Universal Synthesizer Interface is a specification designed to enable inter-connecting synthesizers, sequencers and home computers with an industry-wide standard interface. This is a preliminary specification; comments, criticism, and alternative proposals are welcome. This interface specification has not been tested and would need to be retrofitted to any equipment presently in the field. The interface is basically specified as one-to-one between two units; ie, a synthesizer and a sequencer. Under certain circumstances, however, more units may be placed on a single line.

Authors: Smith, Dave; Wood, Chet
Affiliation: Sequential Circuits, Inc., San Jose, CA
AES Convention: 70 (October 1981) Paper Number: 1845
Publication Date: October 1, 1981
Subject: Electronic Music and Musical Instruments

by Smith, Dave; Wood, Chet

Dave Smith and Chet Woods present a Universal Synthesizer Interface running at 19.2 kBaud, using regular 1/4″ phone jacks, but there are already on-going discussions about data speed, data format and different choices for connectors.

The 3rd Synthesizer Interface Conference
Tokyo, Japan
December 24, 1981

The Japanese companies propose some significant changes to USI.

• Using a 5 PIN DIN cable or XLR cables (a locking cable was better for on stage use)
• Adding a UART with grounding to prevent noise (design by Karl Hirano from Yamaha)

The Yamaha proposal shown in Fig. 3.6 was submitted by Katsuhiko Hirano, who was then Chief of LM Design at Nippon Gakki Co., Ltd. Tetsuo Nishimoto from the same department was in charge of drafting the plan.

The idea is to use an isolator to isolate the ground. A photocoupler is used for the circuit.

Roland proposed a slight modification of the hardware design and using a 5 PIN DIN which Roland was already using for DIn Sync although at the time, 5 PIN DIN. connectors were still rare in the US.

Tadao Kikumoto, General Manager of the Roland Osaka Technical Center made suggestions for Tempo, Start, Stop, Forward and Backward messages and also introduced the concepts of Running Status, and Status Bytes and Data Bytes.

All of these were significant additions to the evolving MIDI Specification

An alternative specification was presented by some of the Japanese companies which had grown out of their own research.

Whereas the USI was basically content to specify note on/off codes, this new proposal went on to define many more complex operations. It also offered a different data structure, with status and data bytes being flagged by bit 7 O=status, O=data). This greatly simplified the protocol by eliminating all the checks which were otherwise needed to distinguish the data category. With the most significant bit now defined as a “flag,” data is thereby limited to 7 bits, but this is sufficient for most synth data, and when not, can simply be sent as multiple 4–bit nibbles.

by Stanley JungLeib in the Preliminary Prophet 600 Manual

MIDI Gets Its Name
Musical Instrument Digital Interface

At around the same time, there were discussions about the name of the new standard. There was concern that Universal Synthesizer Interface might cause some antitrust problems. The Japanese suggested UMI Universal Music Interface (You-Me) and Dave Smith countered with the name we all know today- MIDI or Musical Instrument Digital Interface.

Winter NAMM
Anaheim, California
Feb 5-7 1982

At the NAMM show in January 1982, a meeting with a number of synth manufacturers (Sequential, Roland, Oberheim, CBS/Rhodes, Yamaha, E-mu, Korg, Music Technology Inc., Kawai, Octave Plateau, Passport Designs, Syntauri and some others. but the companies could not agree on anything. The meeting did not go well. It was the American and European manufacturers who couldn’t agree. Some wanted expensive high data rate connectivity, others didn’t even see the point of an interface and so no consensus was reached and the meeting ended.

But after the meeting, Kakehashi-san from Roland sent Sakai-san to talk to Dave Smith encouraging him not to give up.

Dave explained it all in this 1997 video.

After incorporating changes in response to comments from AES, Smith sent a questionnaire to all manufacturers and industry consultants he could find, asking for their suggestions and any special requirements. There was a strong response to this initiative; some saying, for example, that it would not be possible to do it serially, that a parallel interface was necessary. Others thought the proposed serial speed too fast for operation with home computers. Many other issues were raised.

All respondents were invited to a conference in coincidence with the January, 1982 Western National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) convention in Anaheim. This meeting was attended by representatives from SCI, Roland, Oberheim, CBS/Rhodes, Yamaha, E-mu, Unicord (Korg), Music Technology Inc., Kawai, Octave Plateau, Passport Designs and Syntauri.

Other manufacturers seemed to be maintaining a “wait-and-see” policy.

by Stanley JungLeib, Prophet 600 Preliminary Manual

Fax Communications between Sequential and Japanese companies
July 23, 1982

Sequential was planning on polyphonic synths with more polyphony.  The original USI spec had 8 channels and at the time a channel equaled a monophonic voice.  So originally the MIDI spec would have only allowed for 8 notes of polyphony.

Dave didn’t really want to tell the Japanese exactly what he was working on, but made some suggestions for improve the spec.

On July 23, 1982, a FAX was sent from Roland (serving as liaison for the Japanese companies) to Sequential Circuits agreed to:

• Distinguish between polyphonic and monophonic content
• increase the number of channels to 16 channels

Jeff Rona starts working for Roland on MIDI
Summer of 1982

I was at a local music store in Hollywood and struck up a casual conversation with a couple of guys from Roland who happened to be there at the time. When I told them what I was doing with synths and desktop computers, they got very excited. Within a couple days I found myself in the office of Tom Beckman, the president of Roland US explaining my work and background. When he asked me if I wanted a job and could I write code for music software. I lied, basically, and said yes. I became a programmer and instrument designer for Roland that day.

by Jeff Rona, MIDI from the Inside

Brian Vincik connects with Sequential
Summer of 1982

Brian Vincik, an engineer from Hewlett Packard starts discussions with John Bowen and Sequential about MIDI and starts to form ideas about the International MIDI Association, an organization to promote the idea of MIDI to companies and the public

Bob Moog publicly announced MIDI in Keyboard Magazine
November, 1982

In a November 1982 cover interview with Keyboard magazine, Robert Moog announced publicly that Smith and Wood had been working on an invention: MIDI.

by Author

The Prophet 600 Preliminary Manual
December, 1982

Brian Vincik provided with the MIDI Association with many files and one of the most interesting is the Prophet 600 Preliminary Manual written in December of 1982.  It included a MIDI History that was deleted from the actual manual that was shipped with the product.

It is included here both as a PDF and as text which is easier to read.

MIDI HISTORY

Stanley JungJeib, SCI

Introduction

The Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) is a specification which enables manufacturers to design equipment that is basically compatible. This is most beneficial for the owner, whose equipment is thereby protected from obsolesence. As MIDI-compatible equipment is introduced, one will be able to freely choose keyboards, sequencers, and rhythm units from a variety of manufacturers with confidence that they will work together as one programmable system through which complete pieces can be composed and realized.

The problem of instrument compatibility is not new. It can be probably said of any two keyboards, that someone has desired if not actually tried to interconnect them. Keyboard couplers were developed for both pipe organs and harpsichords. In the heyday of electric organ technology this interest occasionally led to the installation of thick cables for wiring keyboards in parallel. The first synthesizers were easier to interface, because of the nature of modular equipment. However modules from different manufacturers might have incompatible control voltage, trigger, gate, and output levels or polarities. These differences have been promulgated in scores of synthesizer, keyboard, and effect devices, ultimately giving rise to an entire industry devoted to modifications and interfacing. And though they provide the best opportunity for interface so far, even microcomputer-based synthesizer equipment has been developed along independent, incompatible lines.

Like many other defacto “standards,” the MIDI has arisen primarily from the activities of those concerned that the incompatibility of current equipment discourages wider availability of the kinds of complex systems which can be envisioned utilizing even current technology. (The S-100 microcomputer buss evolved for similar reasons.) It is more than anything else the advent of the home computer which has forced music manufacturers to finally address the issue of compatibility. For the musician, the keyboard interface to the computer terminal offers the possibility of multi-track sequencing and editing, score display and printing. In this light the usefulness and need for a standard computer keyboard interface is obvious. Only with some such standard can these musical tools be developed.

The following explains how the MIDI specification resulted from this industry-wide consensus. The MIDI specification neither possesses nor claims any authority over equipment design. Rather, it is merely an informal agreement on some simple interface circuitry and the “grammar” of a non-proprietary language which can carry meaningful information between instruments. The incorporation or support of the MIDI facility in a product remains entirely a decision for each manufacturer.

GENERAL

The SCI Digital Interface

SCI first became interested in microcomputer interfacing in conjunction with the design of the Prophet-10 polyphonic synthesizer and its internal polyphonic sequencer. The Prophet and its sequencer each were based on Z-80 microcomputers. To record, as notes were played, every few milliseconds (at a rate set by the sequencer clock), the Prophet would send its complete keyboard “status” to the sequencer. The sequencer had to figure out which notes were going on and off, and record these events in reference to the clock count. On playback, the sequencer computer also sent the complete keyboard status every clock pulse, with events as counted out by the clock. The Prophet would play these notes just as if they came from its own keyboard. later, this sequencer was made available as an accessory for the Prophet-5. The Prophet-5 Remote Keyboard was also developed which used this interface. SCI published the data protocol upon which this interface was based, in the hopes that the programming public would be encouraged to develop their own interfaces for the Prophet-5.

This did not occur, apparently because in being conceived for a specific application, the interface was very fast but too clumsy for general-purpose use. It was criticized as requiring too much programming “overhead,” in the constant transmission of meaningless keyboard information. As a result of this experience, SCI resolved to pursue a more streamlined interface that would be easier for programmers to work with.

The Universal Synthesizer Interface

In the meantime, occasional discussions between the presidents of Sequential Circuits (SCI), Oberheim Electronics, and Roland (Dave Smith, Tom Oberheim and Ikutaroo Kakehashi) also revealed a shared interest in the interface problem and development of an interface widely acceptable to the industry.

Smith then outlined a specification for a “Universal Synthesizer Interface” (USI). It was developed with the assistance of SCI’s Chet Wood and presented at the Fall, 1981 convention of the Audio Engineering Society (AES).

The USI differed markedly from the earlier SCI Digital interface in that rather than being polled at the sequencer clock rate, information was only sent when an event actually occured–for example, a note going on or off. The USI was proposed to be serial, operating at 19.2 kBaud, with TTL levels, and connected through phone jacks.

After incorporating changes in response to comments from AES, Smith sent a questionnaire to all manufacturers and industry consultants he could find, asking for their suggestions and any special requirements. There was a strong response to this initiative; some saying, for example, that it would not be possible to do it serially, that a parallel interface was necessary. Others thought the proposed serial speed too fast for operation with home computers. Many other issues were raised.

All respondents were invited to a conference in coincidence with the January, 1982 Western National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) convention in Anaheim. This meeting was attended by representatives from SCI, Roland, Oberheim, CBS/Rhodes, Yamaha, E-mu, Unicord (Korg), Music Technology Inc., Kawai, Octave Plateau, Passport Designs and Syntauri.

Other manufacturers seemed to be maintaining a “wait-and-see” policy.

At this meeting the chief changes which occured to the USI were to add optoisolation to prevent audio ground loops, and to increase the speed to 31.25 kBaud.

The Japanese Interface Proposal

Following the USI discussion at Anaheim, an alternative specification was presented by some of the Japanese companies which had grown out of their own research. Whereas the USI was basically content to specify note on/off codes, this new proposal went on to define many more complex operations. It also offered a different data structure, with status and data bytes being flagged by bit 7 O=status, O=data). This greatly simplified the protocol by eliminating all the checks which were otherwise needed to distinguish the data category. With the most significant bit now defined as a “flag,” data is thereby limited to 7 bits, but this is sufficient for most synth data, and when not, can simply be sent as multiple 4–bit nibbles.

The MIDI

After the Anaheim meeting, Smith and Wood integrated the USI and Japanese proposals, forming the first MIDI specification. This was sent to all of the meeting participants but, curiously, provoked no further comment from this continent.

The final document was therefore arrived at after several exchanges between SCI and Roland, which is serving as liason with Yamaha, Korg, and Kawai.

The development of MIDI was first made public by Robert Moog, in his October, 1982 column in KEYBOARD magazine.

In December of 1983, SCI began shipping the Prophet-600, the first commercially available instrument to include the MIDI.

Winter NAMM
Anaheim, California
Jan 21-23 1983

Here is the iconic picture of the first demonstration of MIDI between a Sequential Circuits 600 and a Roland Jupiter 6.

John Bowen is the person with his back to the camera wearing the red Sequential Circuits jacket.

Dave Smith said that they were not sure if the MIDI demo would work at all, but it did.

He also said he was late to the Roland booth.  Security guards didn’t want to let him in because he didn’t have a NAMM property pass.

MIDI is not yet a standard and there is no official specification to share and no standards organization in either Japan or the rest of the world.

But MIDI was about to shake up the world for the next 40 years.

In our next chapter, we will look at the first tumultuous years of MIDI between the winter of 1983 and the Summer NAMM in 1985 when the MIDI Manufacturers Association was established.

Interview with John Bowen
Head of Sound Design for Sequential Circuits

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 Music Sequencers was well established. 

• A synthesizer is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals.
• A music sequencer is a device or application software that can record, edit, or play back music, by handling note and performance information.
• A drum machine is an electronic musical instrument that creates percussion sounds, drum beats, and patterns. 

To really understand MIDI, we need to explain the way electronic musical instruments were connected together before MIDI. 

Analog connections with CV/GATE

Before MIDI, the most common way to interface analog synthesizers was analog connections using CV (Control Voltage) and Gate. 

With analog synthesizers, the pitch of the sound is determined by the height of the voltage. This voltage is called CV for control voltage. Whether or not to any sound is emitted is controlled by a voltage called Gate.

In early modular synthesizers, each synthesizer component (e.g., low frequency oscillation (LFO), voltage controlled filter (VCF), etc.) can be connected to another component by means of a patch cable that transmits voltage.

Changes in that voltage cause changes to one or more parameters of the component.

This frequently involved a keyboard transmitting two types of data (CV and gate), or control modules such as LFOs and envelope generators transmitting CV data:

• Control voltage (CV) indicates which note (event) to play: a different voltage for each key pressed; those voltages are typically connected to one or more oscillators, thus producing the different pitches required. Such a method implies that the synthesizer is monophonic. CV can also control parameters such as rate, depth and duration of a control module.
• Trigger indicates when a note should start, a pulse that is used to trigger an event, typically an ADSR envelope. In the case of triggering a drum machine, a clock signal or LFO square wave could be employed to signal the next beat. The trigger can be a specific part of an electronic pulse, such as the rising slope of an electronic signal.
• Gate is related to a Trigger, but sustains the signal throughout the event. It turns on when the signal goes high, and turns off when the signal goes low.

by Wikipedia

Analog Sequencers

Moog, Buchla and ARP had always included Analog Sequencer Modules in their modular designs.

Within a few years other companies including Roland and Korg were making similar products.

The Challenge with Control Voltages

The problem with Control Voltage was that from the very start there were two different standards. 

• Volts per octave was popularized by Bob Moog in the 1960s. 
  • One volt represents one octave, so the pitch produced by a voltage of 3 V is one octave lower than that produced by a voltage of 4 V. 
  • Each 1 V octave is divided linearly into 12 semi-tones. 
  • Companies using this CV method included Roland, Moog, Sequential Circuits, Oberheim, ARP and later the Eurorack standard from Doepfer, including more than 7000 modules from at least 316 manufacturers.

However, other manufacturers have used different implementations with voltages including –5 V to 5 V, 0 V to 5 V, 0 V to 10 V with the B+ possibly on the tip.

• Hertz per volt was used by most but not all Korg and Yamaha synthesizers, represents an octave of pitch by doubling voltage, so the pitch represented by 2 V is one octave lower than that represented by 4 V, and one higher than that represented by 1 V.

The two implementations are not completely incompatible. 

Connecting a Hz/volt keyboard to a volts/octave synthesizer will produce sound, but it will be completely out of tune. 

Of course with voltages it was easy to modify things with a few parts and a soldering iron.

At least one commercial interface has been created to solve the problem, the Korg MS-02 CV/trigger interface.

But these interfaces weren’t really intuitive for musicians and there were a lot of cables involved. 

The Roland Micro Composer MC 8

The Roland MC-8 released in 1977 was a seminal product.  It was a microprocessor based sequencer that connected to an MC-8 Interface to send out analog voltages.   So it it was a hybrid digital and analog system. 

It was initially conceived by Ralph Dyck, a Canadian composer and Roland System 100 user. 

Ralph went his his local Roland dealer in Canada who introduced him to Ikutaro Kakehachi, the President of Roland. 

Kakehachi got Roland engineer Yukio Tamada involved who made the Micro Composer capable of multi-tracking (allowing multiple parts to be played simultaneously).  The MC-8 could play eight notes at the same time so it was capable of complex chords. 

Tamada-san also integrated the so-called ST/GT method -Step Time for sound length and Gate Time for note length. 

This ST/GT concept was later adopted by other Japanese manufacturers.

The Microcomposer is also significant in the development of music production concepts because it was also the first time that a Time Base with resolution of a quarter note was introduced into the world of modular synths. 

Many of the ideas that were developed for the Micro Composer would find their way into an industry standard musical digital interface that was on the horizon. 

Interview from the Vintage Roland MC-8 Sequencer Archive

In the late 1970s, musicians certainly had virtually no background in computers. What sort of reaction did they have to the “music by numbers” method of programming the MC-8?

Ralph Dyck:
They didn’t like it much except Tomita and Steve Porcaro and Suzanne Ciani.
Steve Porcaro did a lot of musically interesting parts with it.

When was the last time you worked with an MC-8, and what sort of production was it?

I think that the last time I used an MC-8 was with Toto, maybe for their album ‘Turn Back’. 

The Oberheim System- OB-8, DMX and DSX

Marcus Ryle (who would later design the Alesis ADAT and then go on to found Line 6) was just 19 years old when he got a job at Oberheim in 1980.  

He had been studying at UC Santa Dominguez Hills because they had just installed a recording studio with a synthesizer. Tom Oberheim came as a guest lecturer to the college and after a long conversation with Marcus hired him to work at Oberheim alongside Tom and JL Cooper.   

Oberheim had just come out with the OBXa which had a 37 pin D-Sub connector with a parallel bus. Soon Marcus was working on the design for the DSX Sequencer.   

By connecting an Oberheim polyphonic synth to a DSX and the DMX Drum Machine,  you had a complete music system. 

The heart of this system is the DSX sequencer which can control the whole family of Oberheim polyphonics – the OB-X, the OB-Xa and the latest model, the OB-8 via a computer interface. It also has 8 separate CV and gate outputs to control up to 8 analogue synths of the 1 volt per octave variety. It has a capacity of 6,000 notes and is capable of 16-voice polyphony. It can store up to 10 sequences at any one time and there is cassette storage for building up a repertoire of sequences. Each individual sequence can be independently recorded over 10 tracks and there are two recording modes: Real Time (with a 1/192 note resolution) or Quantize which will auto-correct your playing to ½ note (minimum) maximum or 1/32 note (demi-semiquaver) minimum. There is also a programmable metronome with an internal speaker.

by Paul Wiffen for Electronics & Music Maker, Future Publishing

You can even see by the back panel of a DSX Sequencer how intimidating musical instrument interfacing could be in the early 1980s.

Here is a recording from 1983 of what was possible with the Oberheim System. 

DCB- Roland’s Digital Communications Bus

Roland’s DCB (Digital Communication Bus was a proprietary data interchange interface by Roland Corporation, developed in 1981 and introduced in 1982 in their Roland Juno-60 and Roland Jupiter-8 products. DCB only provide note on/off, program change and VCF/VCA controls. The DCB interface was made in 2 variants, the earlier one used 20-pin sockets and cables, later switching to the 14-pin Amphenol DDK connector vaguely resembling a parallel port. 

The DCB was a Serial Interface that ran at 31.25Kbps the same rate as MIDI over 5 Pin Din. 

Roland Din Sync

To synchronize their sequencers and rhythm machines Roland developed a proprietary for syncing using a 5 PIN DIN Connector

In 1981, the stage is set for the MIDI revolution

By 1981, multiple companies were working on proprietary digital interface standards including Oberheim, Sequential Circuits, Roland and Yamaha. 

But several companies were already starting to worry about the problems these proprietary standards would create. 

Customers would be forced to choose one company’s system and be locked into only one way of making music or they would have to spend lots of money on interface convertors to connect gear from different manufacturers together. 

A couple of companies started to dream about a universal standard for synthesizers and music production. 

In the next chapter of MIDI history, we will finally to tell the full story of how MIDI got started, who helped to make it happen and the challenges that MIDI faced in its early days between 1981 and 1985. 

Dave Rossum is another one of the founders of the modern music production ecosystem and had a unique relationship with several other key synth figures including Dave Smith and Tom Oberheim.  

In fact, it was core technologies that Dave developed that allowed Oberheim and Sequential Circuits polyphonic synthesizers to be developed in the 1970s. 

Dave was born in 1948 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. He “dropped out of high school” to attend California Institute of Technology and graduated in 1970 with a degree in biology. 

After he graduated from college, he moved to Santa Cruz, Ca to study at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) with the intention of getting a PhD. 

His molecular biology professor, Dr Harry Knoller,  was also an accomplished musician and had heard that UCSC had just received a new musical instrument, a Moog Model 12 synthesizer.  

In his 2022 Synthplex presentation presented below, Dave described what happened next.  

This was the moment when God took me by the nose and said “Over here, Dave”

by Dave Rossum on unpacking a Moog Model 12 synth at USSC in 1970. 

Dave Rossum’s talk about the history of EMU at Synthplex 2022 

 If there is one definitive source about the history of EMU, this is it.  

Special thanks to Michael Lehman Boddiker and Synthplex for arranging and recording Dave’s amazing presentation about his impact on the history of modern synthesizers. 

1978 Data Sheets for EMU/SSM chips

The Emulator Sampling Keyboard is born

In 1979, Dave and Scott saw the Fairlight CMI and LM-1 from Roger Linn at the NAMM show. They both realized the potential for sample based instruments and the advantages that EMU had in being able to design their own chips. 

According to some sources, there was discussion about licencing the Emulator technology to Sequential Circuits.  However at around the same time,  Sequential decided to stop paying royalties for the EMU keyboard scanning chip.  This lead to a dispute between the two companies and also forced EMU to come out with the Emulator on their own.  

This proved to be a wise decision on EMU’s part because the Emulator line of sampling keyboards- 

Emulator (1981)

Emulator II (1984)

Emulator III (1987)

Emulator IV (1994)

set the direction for the company for the next ten years. 

The list of artists that used the Emulator samplers is too large, but here is a summary from Wikipedia. 

The Emulator II was popular with many musicians in the 1980s, such as early adopter Stevie Wonder, and was used extensively by Front 242, Depeche Mode, 808 State (on their 1989 album Ninety) New Order, ABC, Genesis, Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Herbie Hancock, Vangelis, Tangerine Dream, Jean-Michel Jarre, Yes, OMD, Stevie Nicks, Mr. Mister, and many more. The list is far from complete however as it became the staple sampler of just about every recording studio that could afford one in the 1980s, and thus was used on a multitude of albums at the time.

It even featured in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, where Ferris uses the Emulator II to play sounds of coughing and sneezing in order to feign illness on the phone. 

by Wikipedia

The overall impact of the Emulator sampler on the history of synthesizers can’t be underestimated as it soon led to sample based instruments with samples stored in ROM memory that included Ensoniq products, the Roland D-50, the Korg M1 and many, many more products including sample based software and hardware products that are still sold today. 

EMU Drum Machines

EMU released the first affordable ($999) drum machine with ROM based samples in 1983 (right on the cusp of the MIDI revolution).  

They followed up with the SP-12 in 1985 which allowed users to create their own samples.  The SP-12 was based on the Emulator ( and even had some parts that were interchangeable).  The SP12 was also help start the trend of integrating sampling and sequencing together.  This combination being able to create your own sounds and then sequence them helped fuel the hip hop revolution that was starting to happen right around the same time. 

In fact, the SP-1200 (the 1987 follow up to the SP-12 with more sampling and sequencing memory (and MIDI) is considered one of the most influential products in the history of Hip Hop. 

EMU and Creative Labs

In 1993, E-mu was acquired by Creative Technology, the Singaporean company that was focused on computer sound cards (with MIDI interfaces, of course).  Products like the Creative Wave Blaster II and Sound Blaster AWE32 used the EMU8000 effect processor. 

Also in 1990s, E-mu made many different sound modules based on the Proteus series which were rackmount MIDI tone generators. In 1998, Creative Technologies merged Ensoniq, another American synthesizer company they had acquired together with EMU. 

From the late 1990s to 2011, Creative Labs continued to build sound cards using EMU technology.  However Creative was in the brutally competitive, low margin business of PC peripherals.  There were lawsuits with other companies (notably Aureal and Apple) which drained resources. As well the market for hardware peripherals shrank as computers became more powerful and software synthesis became more dominant. 

In 2011, Creative Technologies shut down EMU.  

Creative Technologies still sells products under the Soundblaster name. 

Rossum Electro-Music

Fortunately Dave Rossum’s contributions to the world of synthesizers didn’t end with Creative Technologies.  

In 2015, Dave formed Rossum Electro Music and started creating new synthesizer products. 

Some of these products go back to his early roots and take advantage of the renewed interest in modular synths created by the EuroRack format.

Other products are reissues of some of the most famous EMU products like the SP1200.  

Like Alan Pearlman, Bob Moog, Don Buchla, Dave Smith, Ikutaro Kakehashi, Roger Linn, Tom Oberheim, and Tsutomu Katoh, Dave Rossum’s impact on the modern music production environment is not relegated to the past, but continues to evolve and shape the future of the way people make music.  

From more information about Dave Rossum, EMU, and Rossum Electro, check out these excellent resources

Alan Robert Pearlman was born in 1925 (9 years before Bob Moog and 12 years before Don Buchla although he would outlive them both) and grew up in New York City.  

Like many electronics buffs in the mid 20th century, he grew up making radios out of kits and schematics from Popular Mechanics.  

He attended Worcester PolyTechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, Ma.  It’s perhaps an odd coincidence, but Tom White (former MIDI Association President) and Pete Brown (current MIDI Association Executive Board Chair representing Microsoft) both attended WPI and current MIDI Association president Athan Billias grew up in Worcester. 

Like Don Buchla, Pearlman did engineering work for NASA where he designed amplifiers for the Gemini and Apollo space programs. 

Then in 1969, he founded ARP (based on his initials and the nickname he had as a kid growing up) and soon started producing the ARP 2500 modular synthesizer. 

The Arp 2500

The ARP 2500 had two important differences from Moog and Buchla modular synths. 

Instead of patch chords, the 2500 used a set of matrix switches to make connections between modules. 

Perhaps even more importantly, Pearlman had found a way to solve a fundamental problem with the other modular synths. Because of their design, Moog and Buchla synths were sensitive to temperature (and changes in line voltage).  Pearlman had a lot of experience in designing Op Amps from his time at NASA and he explained his solution to the problem which was to use dual transistors on a single integrated circuit. 

“Bob Moog came up with a generator for logarithmic function and exponential function in different locations. They were not at the same temperature and would drift apart and get out of tune with each other. I saw papers by other engineers which showed means of stabilizing these functions by building constant temperature devices. It was much easier to simply put them at the same chip.”

by  Alan Pearlman

Synthesizers take center stage in the 1970s

By the early 70s, there were a lot of famous bands that were using synthesizers.  Rock bands like the Who were using the ARP 2500 on albums like Quadrophrenia and Tommy. Keyboard players from a variety of genres were expanding their sonic palette. 

A great example of what was possible with a monophonic modular synthesizers is Elton John’s 1973 release “Funeral For A Friend”.  The extended intro that song was created by the sound engineer on the album David Hentschel. 

The way I used to work was to write charts out and then play monophonic parts on the ARP so I could play with one hand and adjust the gain and so on at the same time, to give it more dynamics. Playing polyphonically on analogue synths can give rather flat results. You don’t get any sense of movement. But if you write the parts out and then play them monophonically, then you get a lot more control.

by David Hentschel

The ARP 2600

In 1971, ARP released the ARP 2600  which had some significant improvements to the 2500’s design.  The 2600 could use both patch chords and had matrix switches.  The patch chords gave more possibilities, but the 2600 could be used without patch chords which made it easier to use on stage. 

Another advance which would prove prophetic was to separate the keyboard and allow the keyboard to connected remotely to the modular synth by cable (just as MIDI would allow for remote keyboard and sound modules a few years later. 

Edgar Winter figured out that he could put a guitar strap on the remote keyboard for the 2600 and wear like a guitar inventing the “Keytar”. 

Arp Synths have a Close Encounter with Hollywood

In 1977, not only were the sounds of the ARP 2500 featured in Steven Spielberg’s film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, but the 2500 itself and even ARP Instruments’ VP of engineering Phil Dodds (pictured here as the operator) were in the film.  

ARP and Artists

ARP was one of the first companies to successfully use artists in magazine advertisements to promote synthesizers. 

Artists including The Who, Stevie Wonder, Joe Zawinul, George Duke, Herbie Hancock and many others were featured in ARP ads. 

It’s also important to point out that the Arp Soloist pictured above was one of the first synths to feature Presets. 

ARP Corporate History

 ARP was founded in 1969, by Alan Pearlman with $100,000 of his own money and support from a small group of investors. 

ARP went public in 1973 and the company’s annual sales reached $7 million in 1977. 

However the company invested heavily in the development of the the Avatar guitar synthesizer.  Increased competition and falling  sales figures led to a financial crisis and the company was liquidated in 1981. 

Alan Pearlman passed away in Pearlman died on January 5, 2019, at the age of 93.

There have been many softsynth recreations of ARP synthesizers, but the TimewARP 2600 software re-creation of the ARP 2600 is the only software re-creation that Pearlman himself endorsed.

Recently Korg released reissues of several ARP products so ARP products live on.  

His daughter,  Dina R. Alcalay Pearlman established the Alan R Pearlman Foundation with the mission to celebrate the legacy of inventor, musician, entrepreneur and engineer Alan R. Pearlman, by making his innovative inventions publicly accessible, and inspiring future generations to imagine and create.

For more information about ARP, please check out the following links.

At almost the exact same time that Bob Moog was starting to make modular synths on the East Coast, Don Buchla was starting to make modular synths on the West Coast at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. 

Buchla was born in Southern California in 1937 and studied physics and music at UC Berkeley graduating with as a physic major in 1959. 

He after graduation in the early 1960s, he worked on engineering projects for the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (“Rad Lab”), NASA, and the California School for the Blind. As mentioned in other articles, Dave Smith and Brian Vincik first jobs were in the aerospace industry.

His first modular synth was commissioned by Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick in 1963 with a $500 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Although the Moog and the Buchla 100 series Modular Electronic Music System were both modular synths, they were very different.  

In fact, if you going to use one word to describe Don, different would probably be the right one. 

His approach to oscillators was vastly different than Moog’s. He focused on more complex waveforms and methods for generating then then simple sawtooths, sines and triangles. 

In fact, Don did not like to call his products “synthesizers’ because to him that implied that they were trying to synthetically  recreate existing instruments.  Instead true to the experimental background of composers like Subotnick and Rame, Buchla focused on creating new as yet unheard of sounds sounds and new a unique ways of controlling them.

Even the nomenclature used for Buchla’s modular components is unique, yet appropriately descriptive. Rather than an oscillator, filter, amplifier, and sequencer, Buchla’s instruments have a Complex Waveform Generator, a Multiple Arbitrary Function Generator, a Source of Uncertainty, a Quad Dynamics Manager, and so on.

by Buchla US Website

Buchla favored Touchplates over traditional keys

From the very beginning, Don Buchla had a design philosophy that made his products unique. He used capacitive Touchplates instead of standard keys.  The advantage of Touchplates is that they provide a second dimension of expression. You can slide your finger up and down on the keys and generate control signals. 

Don Buchla was a master at designing control interfaces. Every control based module was designed in a way that would challenge the musician to think outside the box. While he was not against standard keyboards, as most people theorize, he felt that the keyboard commanded the performer to think within a certain set of preconceived motions. The touchplate that we all know and love was originally based on an invention of Don’s from his days as a freelance engineer working for NASA; they were installed as fuel sensors in rocket fuel tanks.

by https://www.memsproject.info/

If you had any doubt????

If you had any doubt that Don Buchla had a different approach to sound, synthesis and life in general, please read a bit of this advertisement (?) , manual (?), prayer (?) or perhaps just refreshingly crisp word salad copied from the Buchla US website. 

It’s no mystery that Don was a known participant at the Trips Festivals in San Francisco, often helping with the sound and music aspects of the festival. The San Francisco Tape Music Center system was hauled to the festivals and used as a central nervous system/public address station where the MC could manipulate sound and address the audience with modulated voice and psychedelic effects to enhance the audio-visual experience.

by https://www.memsproject.info/

The Buchla 700 -Don’s first MIDI synth

The Buchla 700 was a digital synth made by Don Buchla in 1987 and it had tons of MIDI control, a display with graphics and the classic Touchplates that Don is well known for. 

Buchla MIDI controllers- Thunder, Lightning, Marimba Lumina

Don was always looking to innovate to provide original tools for live artistic expression and by the late 1980s Don recognized the lack of original interfaces in the market and focused on designing unique and different MIDI controllers. 

Don’s controllers fully exploited the possibilities of MIDI: Thunder read location and pressure of the fingers mapped to an ergonomic and artistic layout, the Lightning interprets gestures by 2 independent wireless wands, and the Marimba Lumina sees the strikes and location of 4 independent mallets. 

All three could be programmed turn its recognized gestures into almost any combination of MIDI notes and controllers. And those three are only include a partial list of the controller ideas that were being worked on. 

Don was always inventive and never stopped exploring.

For more information on Don Buchla, please check out the following websites

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 the early beginnings of MIDI, we kept being surprised at how many times Bob’s name came up.  But that is for a future chapter in the History of MIDI. 

For now let’s focus on what Bob Moog was designing in the 1950s,1960s and 1970s. 

Bob was born in 1934 in Queens, New York. His father was an engineer at Consolidated Edison.  As young boy, he was fascinated by the Theremin. 

At the age 14 in 1949, he built his first Theremin from plans published in the electronics magazine Wireless World (now Electronics World). 

By the age of 19, he had started his first company RA Moog and was selling Theremins and Theremin kits based on his own design which used transistors. One of his customers was Raymond Scott.  You can learn more about Raymond Scott and other early synths  before 1963 including the Theremin by following the link below. 

In 1963, Robert Moog published what is one of the most influential AES papers every released- Voltage-Controlled Music Modules.

In this incredibly short and concise 9 page paper, Bob lays out the foundation for millions of synthesizers that came after and many that are still popular today.

He describes seminal ideas and schematic diagrams for a Voltage Controlled Oscillator, Voltage Controlled Low Pass, Band Pass and Hi Pass Filters and the simple control mechanisms for playing notes on a keyboard. 

The motivation of the present work is the premise that the electronic music composer will benefit having at his disposal a sound apparatus which he can easily understand, quickly set up, and “play” spontaneously, more in the manner of a conventional musical instrument than of a code-controlled apparatus. (This premise has yet to be tested at length).

The system to be de­scribed consists of (a) voltage-controlled signal generating and processing modules and (b) a variety of transducers designed to produce voltages proportional to the position, velocity, and force of the musician’s hands. Particular stress has been placed on attaining a linear variation of the properties of the modules with respect to the control voltage’s magnitude, a feature which enables the modules to be programmed according to simple rules.

CONCLUSION

A group of basic audio signal generating, amplifying, and filtering modules has been described, The salient variable of each module is proportional to a control voltage over a range wide enough to insure utility in the production of electronic music. Specialized modules, such as noise generators and ring modulators, can obviously be used with the basic modules. 

Several control transducers, patterned after the control mechanisms of conventional musical instruments, have been used for the sake of expediency.

The simple and predictable relation between the applied con­trol voltage and the salient variable of each of these modules suggests their application in fields other than electronic music production. In particular, the setting up of prototype experi­mental electronic musical instruments, and the remote-control processing of conventional audio signals are ideal applications for the voltage-controlled modules.

by Bob Moog, AES Paper 1964

Soon with the help of composer Herb Deutsch, Bob was selling soon Moog Modular synths to rock stars and studios. 

Perhaps the one album that brought the synthesizer to mainstream worldwide attention was Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach released in 1968. Suddenly everybody new two new words -Moog and Synthesizer. 

By the late 1960s, it was adopted by rock and pop acts including the Beatles, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, and the Rolling Stones.  Progressive Rock acts like Yes, Tangerine Dream, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer made it even more popular. 

Moog soon added a new module to his Moog Modular synths. The Moog 960 Sequential Controller, a Sequential Sequencer which provided a bank of 8 control voltages that could be used for any purposes including playing back a set of notes with pre-determined pitches.  This was one of the first portable music sequencers. 

The Mini Moog- the first portable and affordable synth

The Minimoog is an amazing story, partly because it highlights something well known about Robert Moog.  

He was a brilliant inventor, but not a great businessman.  He pursued the development of his synthesizer as a hobby and admitted when he started the business he no idea  what a balance sheet was.  

The Minimoog was developed as a side project by Moog engineer Bill Hemsath and Moog staff in 1970 who were afraid they were going to lose their jobs. At first, Bob Moog even opposed its development. 

But he relented and the Minimoog became a huge success and it was the very first synthesizer sold in retail music stores. 

It became an instant hit because it allowed keyboard players to finally compete with guitarists in taking solos. 

Corporate History of Moog Music

Here is a brief summary of the history of Moog products

1953-1971 RA Moog Company

Bob Moog founded RA Moog company at the age of 19 and started by selling Theremins and Theremin Kits. 

The company expanded and started creating modular synths in 1964. However these large modular synths were mainly used in recording studios and universities so had a limited market. Between 1953 and 1971, the company was only profitable in the year after the release of “Switched On Bach” in 1968 and ran deeply into debt. 

1971-1973 muSonics, then Moog Music Inc. 

As a result of the debt, in 1971 Bill Waytena, owner of a company called muSonics bought Moog Music from Bob Moog in 1970.

Waytena had created Musonics with the dream that  he could market synthesizers as a home entertainment products.  It is a cautionary tale repeated over and over again in the musical instrument industry when companies try to move from the professional musicians market to a broader consumer market and overreach their resources. 

1973- Moog Music Inc is purchased by Norlin Music

Norlin Music started in 1920 as Chicago Music Instruments company, the musical instruments distributors that owned the majority of shares of Gibson guitars and Lowrey organs.  In 1969, Chicago Music Instruments was acquired by ECL, a South American beer and cement company and the two companies were merged under the name, Norlin. 

1977- Bob Moog leaves Moog Music to found Big Briar

1978–1987 Mismanagement by Norlin and competition lead to Moog Music’s bankruptcy

Between 1978 and 1987, Moog Music came out with many products, but none achieved the success of the Minimoog. 

The company (Norlin) started to do contract engineering work including subway repair systems, air conditioning systems and even an air hockey table. 

Leave to it to two Harvard Business School graduates to take an iconic musical instrument brand and turn it into an air hockey table. 

The new company was renamed Norlin Corp (a portmanteau of the names Norton Stevens of ECL and Arnold Berlin of CMI; Arnold Berlin, Maurice’ son, and Norton Stevens were friends and classmates at the Harvard Business School).

by Wikipedia

 Big Briar 1977-2022

After leaving Norlin Music in 1977, Bob moved his family to just outside of Asheville, North Carolina.  He then started experimenting and designing new products under the Big Briar name. 

Pictured here are the 100 Series keyboard controller featuring XY Touch Sensitive keys, the 300 Series XY Touch Pad and a Big Briar Theremin like controller. 

Bob Moog and Big Briar continued to develop products including a the Ethervox MIDI Theremin in 1998 and a series of pedals including the MoogerFooger low pass filter. 

2002 – Bob wins a Technical Grammy
and gets back the Moog Music name 

2022 was a very special year for Bob because he won a Technical Grammy and because he was able back the rights to Moog Music name and logo. 

2005 Dr. Robert Moog passes away at age 71

2006 Bob Moog Foundation is founded

Bob Moog’s impact on the development of MIDI

In upcoming chapters of the history of MIDI, we’ll document how Robert Moog was involved with the development of MIDI in some unique and important ways.  

But first, we are planning a series of articles on the founders of the modern music production environment with articles about Alan Pearlman, Don Buchla, Dave Smith, Dave Rossum, Ikutaro Kakehashi, Roger Linn, Tom Oberheim, and Tsutomu Katoh.

However, it seemed fitting to start our series of articles with Dr. Robert Moog for all he did for anyone who has every enjoyed playing synths and creating sounds. 

For more information on Bob Moog, please visit the following websites

Some of you may be aware that Don Lewis passed away the week of Nov 7, 2022.  Don was a synthesis pioneer who created a hardware platform for controlling banks of Synthesizers (Oberheim, Arp 2600s) prior to MIDI, which he called LEO (Live Electronic Orchestra). Mr. Kakehashi of Roland worked with Don starting in 1969 and credits him as an inspiration for what became MIDI 1.0.  I asked his wife Julie Lews if she had some thoughts about what Don would want MIDI Association Members to know about him.  Here are her thoughts. 

Don was often thinking about things that others couldn’t or didn’t want to think about because he was always pushing the envelope especially when he was beta testing new products. It seemed like he always was asking “what if” and reaching for more. Mr. Kakehashi loved his free thinking but was always trying to rein him in when it came to market products understanding the average musician didn’t need so much.

Regarding MIDI, Mr. Kakehashi came to the dedication when LEO first went to the NAMM Museum of Making Music in 2001. In an interview with the museum he said that “Don Lewis was the inspiration for MIDI.” He and Don had been collaborating since 1969. Don conceived of LEO and drew plans in 1974 and in 1977 the components of LEO were physically interfaced by Richard Bates over the course of 3 months in Denver. Mr. K met LEO probably in early 1979 and afterwards made frequent trips to San Francisco with his engineers to take in the magnitude of what Don had accomplished with creating “central controller” keyboards for the ARP 2600’s, the Oberheim SEMs, the Hammond Concorde, effects and even more powerful the ability to mix everything on the controller panel. The Promars on the bass pedals and the huge role of the JP-4 were the toppers to the setup.
When David Smith and Ikutaro Kakehashi received the Grammy for MIDI, Mr. K called Don and invited him to be at his side for the events as he credited Don with having given him the vision. At the last minute, due to health concerns, Mr. K couldn’t make the trip and sent his son Ikuo to receive the Grammy on his behalf. Ikuo told Don that in Japanese part of their family name “hashi” meant “bridge” and that their family considered Don to be a “hashi.” Mr. Kakehashi talks about this in the documentary, “Don Lewis and the Live Electronic Orchestra.” donlewisleo.com

When FM hit the scene and Don was brought into Yamaha for sound design and presentations, one of his big accomplishments was to create an excerpt from the Saint-Saens Symphony #3 final movement (minus the organ which he played live during the performance) for the 1985 presentation to the dealer network. He did it on the QX-1 and the TX-816 and it took several months to enter the score using both real and step time. Although Don seldom performed live with sequencing, this was a huge accomplishment that showcased a new power of MIDI for sequencing and recording. Gary Leuenberger also created sequences for the show and they played live on top. The Yamaha engineers were blown away with tears in their eyes and said they had never dreamed their products could do all this. It was an incredibly exciting time when the power of MIDI was coming to light. Don did a lot of recording and exploration with Jim Miller’s program, Personal Composer, being used by Yamaha in the early days. 

by Julie Tucker Lewis, Don’s wife