Thomas Elroy Oberheim (born July 7, 1936) is an American audio engineer and electronics engineer best known for designing effects processors, analog synthesizers, sequencers, and drum machines. He has been the founder of four audio electronics companies, most notably Oberheim Electronics. He was also a key figure in the development and adoption of the MIDI standard. He is also a trained physicist.
Early life and education
Oberheim was born and raised in Manhattan, Kansas, also the home of Kansas State University. Beginning in junior high school, he put his interest in electronics into practice by building hi-fi components and amplifiers for friends. A fan of jazz music, Oberheim decided to move to Los Angeles after seeing an ad on the back of Downbeat Magazine about free jazz performances at a club there. He arrived in Los Angeles in July 1956 at the age of 20 with $10 in his pocket. He worked as a draftsman trainee at NCR Corporation where he was inspired to become a computer engineer. Oberheim enrolled at UCLA, studying computer engineering and physics while also taking music courses. Over the next nine years he worked toward his physics degree, serving in the U.S. Army for a short period of time, harmonizing with the Gregg Smith Singers, and working jobs at computer companies (most notably Abacus, where he first began designing computers). Oberheim was attending a class during his last semester at UCLA when he met and became friends with trumpet player Don Ellis, and keyboardist Joseph Byrd of the band The United States of America, who were attending the same class. Oberheim stayed in touch with both Ellis and Byrd after leaving UCLA, and ended up building an amplifier for Ellis to use for his public address system. Oberheim also built guitar amplifiers for The United States of America, and their lead singer Dorothy Moskowitz asked him to build a ring modulator for the band (Joseph Byrd had used one while a band member, and Moskowitz wanted one for the band's new keyboardist, Richard Grayson). While ring modulator circuit information was readily available, it was a 1961 article by Harald Bode in Electronics Magazine that gave Oberheim the information he needed to design and hand-build one for musical application. Oberheim also built a ring modulator for Don Ellis. After hearing about Oberheim's device, film composer Leonard Rosenman contacted him for a ring modulator to use in the production of the Beneath the Planet of the Apes film soundtrack. Oberheim, who had grown tired of designing computer equipment, found far greater personal satisfaction in designing equipment used by artists to create music and the positive feedback he received from musicians like Herbie Hancock and Jan Hammer.
Career
Maestro effects units In 1969, the Chicago Musical Instruments Company (CMI) approached Oberheim about his ring modulator, wanting him to become one of their manufacturing contractors. Oberheim raised approximately $6,000 from friends to start Oberheim Electronics. (One of the original investors was Tony Russo, but Oberheim later returned Russo's investment at Russo's request.) Oberheim produced his ring modulator, which CMI marketed as the Maestro RM-1A. At the time, Oberheim was also spending time with the band Bryndle, and had developed a fascination with the sound of instruments being played through a Leslie rotary speaker. This inspired Oberheim to design and build a phase shifter effects unit to imitate that sound. Maestro marketed the phase shifter as the PS-1. The PS-1 was a huge success, selling nearly 25,000 units over the next three years. Oberheim went on to design other products for Maestro, including the Universal Synthesizer for guitars.
Oberheim
Oberheim's forays into the design of equipment to be used by musicians continued to evolve. His associations with Richard Grayson and later Paul Beaver nurtured an interest in synthesizers, and at the 1971 NAMM Show, Oberheim approached Alan R. Pearlman, founder of ARP Instruments, asked to become the company's Los Angeles dealer, and subsequently became ARP's first dealer on the west coast, selling ARP 2600 synthesizers to musicians in the Los Angeles area, including Leon Russell, Robert Lamm, and Frank Zappa. Having access to ARP's schematics, Oberheim noticed that the ARP 2500 had a feature that allowed two notes to be played simultaneously (a capability of neither the 2600 nor other commercially available synthesizers at the time), and Oberheim designed a modification to the ARP 2600 that enabled it to do the same thing. Using two of these modified ARP 2600s, Oberheim and Grayson performed concerts together. Oberheim further expanded on the performance capabilities of 2-note polyphony in 1973, using his computer engineering experience to design the DS-2, one of the first digital-electronics-based music sequencers. The sequencer would completely control (i.e., "play from memory") the synthesizer; however, leaving the musician with no way to play along live on the instrument's keyboard, this also identified a problem that inspired Oberheim to design the Synthesizer Expander Module (SEM) with the design assistance of Dave Rossum (later of E-mu Systems fame), that facilitated simultaneously recorded + live playing (akin to the multi-track audio recording practice of "overdubbing"). Oberheim introduced the SEM, the first synthesizer bearing his company's name, at the Audio Engineering Society convention in Los Angeles in May 1974.
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