You'd be forgiven for having never heard of the Oberheim Perf/X series. When you think about Oberheim, you tend to conjure up images of solid, classic synthesizers and the odd sample-based drum machine or two. The Perf/X, on the other hand, is a weird protrusion of 1980s technology that no one remembers. It's peak plastic futurism, where form and function are secondary to obscure interfaces and a computerized aesthetic. However, someone at Oberheim thought these would look lovely in your late '80s plastic digital studio. To me, they look like oversized cartridges that would plug into an enormous synthesizer.
You'll find only a single passing reference to one of the series on the Oberheim Wikipedia page. Tom Oberheim's list of historical products fails to mention them at all—as he was not involved in their design or marketing, having left his own company before their conceptualization. So, what on earth are they, and where did they come from?
The Perf/X was a series of boxes that they called "MIDI Performance Effects". They came out of the Oberheim bankruptcy era of the late 1980s. The first three boxes, Cyclone, Systemizer, and Navigator were squeezed out between bankruptcies, after Tom Oberheim had moved on to another career. The other two, Drummer and Strummer, came along after the Gibson "rescue" of the Oberheim brand. With Gibson, Oberheim (the company) was still able to produce some interesting products, including the ill-fated OB-Mx analog synthesizer and the Echoplex Digital Pro, but other than maintaining the Matrix 1000 and licensing the brand to Viscount, Gibson did very little with the name. The Perf/X seems somewhat caught in the middle, and no one wants to talk about it.
So you know what? We're going to talk about it.
After a lot of digging, I discovered that the Perf/X series was all about dealing with the generation and processing of MIDI data, with a view to plugging it into the exploding range of MIDI synthesizers and sound sources. They were terribly plastic and literally full of holes that would welcome in beer spillages to give the electronics a nice warm hug. They had a two-digit display, which got increasingly cryptic, and nine helpfully unlabelled buttons. But the software inside was so remarkably innovative and fascinating that all the features were almost immediately stolen and absorbed into every other MIDI device.
Cyclone
The first plastic box is Cyclone, a super-arpeggiator. Arpeggiators had been around for a long time and were a familiar and simple function on most analogue synthesizers. At the end of the 80s, with the arrival of digital synths, they seemed to be less of a thing. Perhaps it was overshadowed by the wonders of MIDI sequencing and deemed unnecessary. However, Oberheim thought it would be interesting to scatter MIDI data around in all sorts of ways, based on the simple action of holding some notes.
Cyclone leaned into the MIDI technology to bring some fun new things to the table. It introduced a whole range of play modes including up, down, up/down, down/up, random, forwards, backwards, ping pong, and so on. Then, it lets you stack new notes on top of the main arpeggiation and introduce rhythms beyond the basic pulse. These sorts of features don't seem remarkable now, as they have become very standard on most synths and MIDI controllers, but it's very possible that Cyclone is responsible for that.
There was a lot of clever stuff in play. You could split off into two separate arpeggios, you could travel through chord inversions for lots of variations, you could add notes and ultimately push it up to a 96-step sequence, and you could separate the rhythm from the melody, letting you play something in real time that would be driven by the rhythm, a lot like a trance gate.
A 1989 Sound On Sound review suggested that the Cyclone was "certainly an interesting (though at times slightly baffling) experience."
Systemizer
Systemizer is all about rechannelling MIDI to turn a regular, single-channel MIDI keyboard or controller into a multi-channel, multi-layered, and multi-zoned MIDI powerhouse. At the time, multi-timbrality was becoming increasingly common on new synths, and studios were expanding with MIDI sound modules and samplers, but your master keyboard might only be able to use one MIDI channel across the whole keyboard. Instead of replacing your keyboard, you could drop the Sytemizer into the MIDI chain and provide all the layering and zoning you could want.
It had other abilities too, like filtering out certain MIDI controllers so you could use a sustain pedal on one layer and not on another. It could transpose and mix levels through the clever scaling of velocity and cope with bank and program change commands, which were very new at the time. The configuration could be altered with foot switches, so you could swap zones on the fly during a performance. Zones were also dynamic, and the Systemizer could float the split point in case you were going to inadvertently cross it mid-solo. It was only moderately successful.
All in all, the Systemizer was a sophisticated and powerful box that could transform a live performance by bringing disparate musical elements together into one workstation. I imagine it was ultimately superseded by master keyboards absorbing all these features.
Navigator
Navigator is the most difficult of these boxes to find information on—likely because it was arguably the most boring of the series. It could store program changes and other MIDI commands and shoot them out to your MIDI boxes—something that many modern sequencers do very easily.
It has some cool features, like changing velocity curves and swapping MIDI commands in real time. You could also set up keys on your keyboard to send the patch change messages and other commands. However, it was short-lived, and seems to have not had much enduring appeal.
Strummer
The Strummer and the Drummer (see below) looked a lot simpler than the other boxes. They had a black front panel, less of an '80s Miami Vice vibe, and sported the Oberheim logo. The idea of the Strummer was to take keyboard chords and transform them into simulated guitar playing. This is much more than playing an arpeggio or creating a small delay on the notes, the Strummer would reinterpret a piano chord voicing into one that would be appropriate on a six-string guitar. Different presets would approach the playing differently, from power chords to fingerpicking, to acoustic strumming and lead solos; the results were quite remarkable.
At the time, samplers were all the rage, and musicians had discovered that while they may have every instrument authentically sampled at your fingertips, the piano keyboard may not be best equipped to play them. Strummer could bash out convincing guitar parts all day long.
It had other interesting features like a very versatile MIDI echo that could send out repeats of notes at various velocities to simulate an audio delay effect. It could capture chords and throw them out on a single note press—or it could record a riff's worth of notes and fire those off on a key press.
Strummer could push itself into all sorts of strange places to generate ways of playing that no one had thought possible. Music Technology Magazine put it as "a guitarist who's moderately competent but not particularly adventurous or original.....but the 'what the hell instrument is that?' stuff makes it exciting."
Drummer
This was sort of an alternative pattern player for all the drum machines around at the time. It had no sounds of its own, and instead you'd plug it into one of the thirteen supported devices, such as the Alesis SR16, Emu Proteus or Korg M1. Supported in that there was no convention or General MIDI mapping at this time, and so each drum machine had its own ideas on how drum sounds were mapped to keys. There were a couple of user kits that you could reconfigure to work with other non-supported machines or samplers.
Each of the 99 presets gave you a basic groove over kick, snare, hats, and tom—and then you could pull in any of the 100 variations. There was an additional percussion track to introduce a random variation of other sounds. You could build songs, add auto-fills, and save it in one of the 16 slots.
Perhaps more interestingly, the Drummer would react dynamically to what you were playing. So, it would listen to the MIDI coming from your master keyboard as you play the piano or synth parts and modify its patterns and add fills to follow what you're doing. That sounds a bit mad, but it’s adding a level of interactivity that could be really useful in live performance.
Right products, Right Time—Wrong Box?
The late '80s and early '90s were a tumultuous time for music technology. Analog synths were dead, digital was king, MIDI was new but evolving, studios had a mishmash of new and old gear and workstations, and MIDI sequencing was revolutionizing music production. Everything was moving so fast that it would take a decade to find our feet again.
Oberheim's Perf/X boxes solved a lot of those early MIDI problems, but in many ways, they didn't have enough time before their features were absorbed into the core products. Master keyboards took on zones and layering, sequences were a more convenient place to set up MIDI commands, and arpeggiators were seen as pointless in the face of MIDI programming. The Drummer and Strummer were pretty brilliant, but again, seemed superfluous to what people thought they needed.
None of the boxes seemed to capture anyone's attention, let alone their imagination. There was too much technology to discover to worry about fixing MIDI problems or mining it for creative possibilities. These days, the features are everywhere. DAWs are full of MIDI programming, keyboards can zone into all sorts of shapes, and the arpeggiator is once again the synth-player's best friend. We have drum machines with infinite variations and reactive qualities that can probably be traced back to the Drummer, and software instruments are full of authentic strumming patterns and auto chord selection.
Given what was happening with Oberheim at the time, I don't think the Perf/X series stood much of a chance. They probably needed explanation and marketing that a failing company couldn't afford. In some ways, the boxes could have been a stab at trying to create something different enough to get noticed, but it all fell a bit flat. However, they are likely responsible for many of the ways we handle MIDI, which we accept as having always been there.
