Imagine a great musical instrument. What does great mean to you? How does it look? How does it sound? How does it feel to play? When I asked you to imagine this great instrument—did you think about an instrument that already exists? Or did you picture something new—something you haven't seen before? Where do great instruments come from?

Regardless of your answers to these questions, I think that we can agree that not every instrument that comes into existence is destined to be a success. Many factors play into the adoption and proliferation of a specific instrument, or even an entire class of instruments. The user interface has to be right—the sound has to be right—and its overall design and concept needs to be correctly aligned with the zeitgeist at the time of its introduction. That's a huge moving target, and the truth is that most new musical instruments won't quite hit it.

Yet, somehow, it's a target that Tom Oberheim has hit several times. Due to his persistent inclination to follow his interests, he has found his way in and out of several seemingly distinct career paths across his life. Though he began his professional career in the fields of engineering and computer system design in the 1950s and 1960s, a series of personal relationships and a keen interest in music gradually led him toward the field of musical instrument design. Beginning c. 1970, Oberheim designed several astonishingly successful effect pedals, including ring modulators and the world's first phase shifter pedal, among others. Working as an early distributor of ARP synthesizers, he found himself leaning toward the synthesizer business. By 1974, he had designed a digital sequencer and, perhaps one of his most notable achievements, the SEM Synthesizer Expander Module: a small, self-contained synthesizer originally designed to augment existing setups. Of course, the SEM came to define "the Oberheim sound." It offered a vastly different sonic palette from other contemporary instruments, and its internal architecture became the basis of Oberheim instruments for years to come.

The Oberheim logo, from the rear panel of an original SEM

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In 1975, Oberheim (and a growing team of brilliant collaborators) accomplished a remarkable feat: they designed and built what is arguably the first commercially-available polyphonic analog synthesizer. The Four-Voice, Eight-Voice, and Two-Voice systems paired multiple SEM voice modules with a keyboard and specialized circuitry for polyphonic control allocation: at the time, a revolutionary development. Later in the decade, in response to new technological developments and the introduction of competing instruments (namely, from Dave Smith's Sequential Circuits), Oberheim would introduce the OB-X, their first fully-programmable polyphonic synthesizer.

In the 1980s, Oberheim's company continued to grow, developing one paradigm-changing device after the next: the DMX sample-based drum machine, the famously programmable Xpander and Matrix-12, and more. But, in 1985, Tom—due to some questionable legal direction—lost control of his company. In the ensuing decades, he drifted away from the music business, working other engineering-oriented jobs in Silicon Valley. However, in the early 2000s, upon the urging of several of his friends, including Roger Linn, he started producing SEMs again from his own garage—and found a surprising level of success building new versions of his original creation. He then went on to collaborate with Dave Smith Instruments/Sequential on the release of the OB-6, placing the Oberheim sound in a distinctly 21st-century polyphonic synthesizer. Just a few years later, his long-time friend and former employee Marcus Ryle helped to re-secure the rights to the Oberheim brand and name. Ever since, Tom has worked with Sequential to bring new Oberheim instruments into production: starting with the flagship OB-X8 and, more recently, the compact TEO-5.

Oberheim's instruments have found a place in some of the best-loved music of the past several decades, including works by Joe Zawinul + Weather Report, Van Halen, Prince, Madonna, and more—in fact, we've been told that just this year, Lady Gaga took a new Oberheim TEO-5 on tour. And while Tom insists that he is retired—with a coy smirk on his face—he continues to collaborate on the creation of new Oberheim instruments: offering guidance and assuring that new instruments stay true to their roots. Indeed, the OB-X8 and TEO-5 are directly based on his personal proudest accomplishment as an instrument designer: the SEM, the synth that started it all.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Tom about his trajectory as an instrument designer. I went into the conversation—like any good synth enthusiast would—with plenty of nitpicky questions about specific instruments and the early days of synthesizer design. What I got in return, though, was a deep personal history, complete with some truly incredible stories and insights about the twists and turns of the audio industry in the 1970s and '80s. Tom is a kind, warm person with an astute sense of humor and a lifetime of valuable perspective, and I appreciate the opportunity to take even a couple of hours to get to know him. Below, you'll find a transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity. I hope that you'll find it as inspiring and entertaining as I did.

Note that Perfect Circuit has recently teamed up with Oberheim to give away a TEO-5: a gnarly new polysynth that packs the Oberheim sound into a compact and stage-worthy package with plenty of modern features, to boot. Head to our contests page for your chance to win—and read on to learn about a profoundly influential figure in the electronic musical instrument industry.

An Interview with Tom Oberheim

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Ryan Gaston: Hi Tom—first of all, thank you for taking the time to talk with me; and I suppose I'll start by asking a bit about your professional background. Where does the story begin?

Tom Oberheim: Well, going back in my days in Los Angeles in the late '60s and early '70s…I didn't have the normal college life. It took me six years to get my bachelor's degree in physics because I had to work full time and support myself completely. But for at least four of those, my typical thing was to work part-time as a computer engineer. I sang in four choirs at the same time, and I could only take one or two classes in physics. But, my life has been pretty much defined by doing exactly what I wanted to do, and no more nor less—so when I finally graduated from UCLA, I had a 2.0 [grade point average]. One grade in one class, and I wouldn't have made it. But that's okay. I had a ball and I enjoyed it.

Originally, I was at Kansas State, actually. I grew up in Manhattan, Kansas, and I had three semesters at Kansas State. But the call of the wild took over, and when I was 20 years old, I left Kansas and went to LA with 10 bucks in my pocket and started from there.

RG: Well, it seems like you found success pretty quickly. You started working almost immediately as a draftsman. Is that right?

TO: Well, I'd had a semester of drafting at Kansas State. And when I got to LA, I first took a job for a few months at Lockheed Aircraft. Actually, I'd worked in a camera shop in my hometown—Manhattan—and I knew how to take pictures and develop film. And so, I actually ended up at the Lockheed Aircraft photo lab. Interestingly enough, in those days—1956—the photo lab was where they did these things that were a very new technology—they were called printed circuit boards. [laughs] Because part of making a printed circuit board is a photographing process.

But then I saw this ad in the LA Times in December of '56 for a draftsman trainee position at a company called National Cash Register. I took that job, and it turned out that it was in a special division of the company: they had bought a little computer company, and they were building their first computer. I got there, and I just fell in love with computers.

In those days you couldn't buy a book on how computers worked—it was too new.

RG: Right—the computer landscape was so different then—way before there were microprocessors, way before any of that.

TO: Yeah, decades. But there were ways to build digital systems then. Basically, they were taking little printed circuit board cards that had different kind of circuits on them and assembling the sorts of things we now have in our laptops. It would take a couple of, you know, five-foot racks—but I just loved it. I just loved it. Just fell in love with learning how the stuff worked. But I didn't stay a draftsman for very long.

RG: Very fair! So, then—how did you get from that point to starting a synthesizer company?

TO: Well, as I said, I arrived in LA in July of 1956 and got that job at the computer company—and I didn't know anything about music. I wasn't a musician.

RG: But you had some attraction to working with music—is that fair to say?

TO: I think the only thing that attracted me to Los Angeles when I was back in Kansas—I read Downbeat magazine, and in the back classified section, every month there was this little ad about a jazz club in a suburb of LA called Hermosa Beach. The club was called The Lighthouse, where these great studio musicians would play. Having all these jazz records, I knew these people's names—and then I thought, "Gee, they're there playing live and it would be great to go to that place!" The ad said "no cover"...but when I got there, I was still only 20 years old, and it wasn't free—you had to buy two drinks! [laughs]

Anyway, that's one of the things that prompted me to leave Kansas and go to LA. And I did go to the Lighthouse! But I didn't know anything about music—certainly not about electronic music. But when I started UCLA in the fall of '56 or '57, I joined the UCLA choir, and I started learning a little bit about classical music. And then I took a music appreciation class. It wasn't a music major course, but it changed me. The teacher was so great—and all of a sudden I found out who Bach was and who Beethoven was. And so I started… buying lots and lots of records. And I think I probably must have at least heard Switched-On [Bach].

RG: So, you had some engineering skills, and you were learning more about music—how did you take your first steps into making music equipment?

TO: I did know a group of people in the music department at UCLA who had started a band called the United States of America. They had one record, and they only lasted about a year. A very good friend of mine who's a keyboard player joined the second generation of that band. And Dorothy Moskowitz, the woman who was leading the band, asked me to build a thing called a ring modulator. And I had no idea what that was. But I did take it on; I went to the UCLA Engineering Library and looked through books and magazines; I looked at the theory, and I had no clue what to do with it in music.

But I did find an article by Harald Bode. This magazine article showed how he built this sound modification system. It wasn't a synthesizer—but it was a patchable sound modification device, and one of the modules was a ring modulator. It showed, well, "You do this, you plug an instrument in here, and put a carrier in here, and you mix them together in the right way…"

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[Above: detail of Harald Bode's Audio System Synthesizer, from the article Tom is describing.]

So I built one. But I never did end up building one for her [Moskowitz], because by then, the group had disbanded. But at UCLA, I'd met Don Ellis, who was a very well-known jazz musician—he started a big band in the late '60s. We became good friends; he was doing electronic stuff—later he actually had some Maestro gadgets that he played his trumpet through. But I built him a ring modulator, and he used it a lot.

So, the word got around that there was this guy making ring modulators. I built one for [Ellis], and a couple more prototype-type things, but around 1968 or '69, I got a call from a movie composer named Leonard Rosenman. He wanted to use piano through ring modulator on Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and so I said, "Sure!"

I had a kind of studio-quality ring modulator by then that, actually, I was building for the UCLA electronic music lab. So, I took it to 20th Century Fox and hooked it up. He put some of those sounds on the soundtrack—and then, when the orchestra took a break, three or four of the orchestra people came over and said, "What is this, Tom?" and wanted to buy one. So I kind of got into a little business of building ring modulators.

RG: What a funny business to stumble into, right?

TO: Yeah. And it was really a hobby, not a business—I was still working as a computer engineer. So I had enough money to live on, and enough to pay for a little red Alfa Romeo sports car. So this was kind of a fun hobby. But, through the people I had met at the UCLA electronic music lab and another couple of musicians, I was introduced to a guy named Paul Beaver.

RG: Paul Beaver, wow. So I assume, then, that this is where you first encounter synthesizers. What did you make of him when you first met him?

TO: Well, he was the electronic music expert for the West Coast the '60s, and had a place in downtown LA. He had an industrial building with a large room with everything—an ondes Martenot and all of that stuff. And he had a huge Moog [modualr synthesizer] system—I think it was the first one on the West Coast.

He spent a whole afternoon showing me what he could do with it, including this sound that later was used as a kind of an introduction to THX productions—but of course, this was way before that. It was just Paul Beaver with his big Moog, and it was just this fantastic sound. That sound is on one of his records—I go back and dig it out once in a while. It's just so great.

[Editor's note: Tom is referring to the ending of "Spaced," from Beaver & Krause's In a Wild Sanctuary.]

RG: So, what year was it when you met Paul, went to his studio, and saw all this?

TO: Mid to late '60s. '66, '7, '8, somewhere in there.

RG: So, in terms of the general adoption of synthesizers, that was still really, really early. I mean, around that time, he and Bernie Krause were responsible for the synthesizer parts in the majority of the major records that used the synthesizer.

TO: Yeah. And through this process, I became part of a very small group of people—maybe only four or five people—that were interested in synthesizers. One of them was a guy named Jim Cooper—who later had a company called J.L. Cooper. Paul Beaver came to those meetings sometimes.

I had one very memorable meeting with them once, when the four or five of us went to the home of Louis and Bebe Barron, who had composed the electronic music for Forbidden Planet. And I'll tell you, that was an experience, because Louis was not what you'd call a "tech head." He was of a different sort—and he preached to us about making love to the electrons—all of it was such a memorable experience.

But as the '70s began, I started making ring modulators for a few people. Eventually, I got a call from the marketing manager for Maestro products at Chicago Musical Instruments. He said, "Maybe we could put that in the product line." And so, that's what happened. We didn't sell a lot at first, but I had a setup where I had an office and I could build them—I don't think I had any employees yet—but the word got around, and I started selling ring modulators. I sold them probably a couple hundred over two or three years.

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[One of Oberheim's Maestro-branded Ring Modulators—image from Perfect Circuit's archives.]

So, I really got interested—and I was so glad to be out of digital stuff. I was sick of it. I had done an awful lot over ten years in digital systems, including, ultimately, the complete hardware design and a large part of the system design of a 24-bit mini computer. This was before microcomputers. And I loved that job, but I was just burned out on digital. I didn't want anything to do with it. Certainly, the ring modulator was all analog.

Around 1971, I had a friend who was a high school teacher in the San Fernando Valley. He taught English. He wasn't a technologist. He wasn't an engineer. And he said, "You know, there are two or three of the people here who have a little band, and they're all interested in rock and roll—and you might be interested to meet them." So, I went out and met these people. Three or four of them later became very big in folk rock, including Andrew Gold, who later played with Linda Ronstadt and then went on his own.

One day I was over there and two of the guys were listening very carefully to a Leslie speaker; I guess they'd read something that one of the Beatles songs had George playing through a Leslie. They thought that was a great sound. And they said, "Tom, can you build something like this?"

And I didn't have a clue. In those days, even though I had [studied] sound in college, I didn't have enough knowledge to tie it into what physically is happening in a Leslie speaker. The vibrato and tremolo, and who knows what else—phase shifting, for sure. But anyway…I played around with it. And from a scientific point of view, I didn't have a clue—but by then, I was starting to play with op-amps and things like that, and I came across what was called a phase shift circuit.

Around the same time, I'd heard a sound on a record that somebody said was probably a flanger. So I called Paul Beaver and I said, "What is this thing called a flanger? How do you do flanging?"

He said, "Well, there's flanging and there's phasing, and they're similar. And it's very simple. You take two tape recorders, you run the same signal through both of them, you take the outputs, and you mix them together—and then you change the speed of the one tape recorder and you get this sound."

And so the key to that was the idea of mixing two signals, but modifying the phase shift. So, I figured that out, and I built a prototype. It worked, and I showed it to the Chicago Musical Instruments guy, and he said, "Oh, yeah, we might sell a few of those." So, I ended up—over the next three years—building and selling to CMI about 70,000 Maestro Phasers.

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[Above: detail of Oberheim's PS-1A Phase Shifter pedal, sold by Maestro in the 1970s. Image via Tom Oberheim's personal website.]

RG: [laughs] Wow—that's incredible. What a success.

TO: So then I was really in business. About the same time, I started going to NAMM. In those days, it was always in Chicago. And I went there and met with the Maestro guy.

I hadn't met anybody at Moog yet, but I did come across ARP at the NAMM show. I was looking for something else to do to supplement my income, because I wasn't really making hundreds and hundreds of phase shifters just yet. I was still kind of scraping by, and I said, "Well, I know what a synthesizer is. Could I be your dealer in LA?"

And they said, "No, we're going to wait until we get set up with Guitar Center," or something. But I kept bugging him, and of course, Guitar Center wasn't interested yet.

RG: No way. That was still much too early—I know big dealers were really hesitant to pick up synthesizers when they were first available on the market.

TO: But eventually they set me up, and I got my first ARP 2600. I stayed up about 35 to 36 hours straight playing it. I knew it backwards and forwards, and by then, I had a Rolodex of ring modulator buyers in LA.

The first guy I sold a 2600 to was Gary Coleman, who was a percussionist who played with the Wrecking Crew. But then I got a call from Lalo Schifrin, who had been composing for Mission Impossible for years. I took it out to his house in Beverly Hills, and he bought one right on the spot. I also sold one to Leon Russell when he lived in Los Angeles—I sold quite a few of them.

RG: So, at that time, how did people react to the fact that the synthesizer was a monophonic instrument with a keyboard interface? Did it seem like there was an expectation that a synthesizer would be polyphonic just because it had a conventional keyboard?

TO: Well, there was no way to do polyphony. The best you could do in analog would be to generate two control voltages. And so you could get a duophonic thing. But…although it was technically possible to do in the early days, using a big room of computers, it was not practical.

But in the late '60s and early '70s, one of the guys I became very close friends with was Richard Grayson, who was getting his PhD in music at UCLA. Richard was a really fantastic improviser, and once a year he'd do a solo concert where he'd improvise. And he was in the United States of America—the band that was fronted by this woman who asked me to build a ring modulator. So Richard knew about ring modulators. In '69 or '70, he asked me if I'd like to help him do some improvised electronic music at his concerts. And so I put together this crude little thing of two ring modulators, a Revox [tape machine] with a foot pedal speed control, and a mixer and stuff. He was very good at this kind of stuff. And so he would do improvised electronic music—and even did a record.

During that same time period, I was selling the ARP 2600, Odysseys, et cetera, et cetera, and I discovered that it wasn't that hard to make a little "duophonic kit" that could go in the 2600 where the the left-hand controls were, and you could generate two control voltages from the keyboard. And I got this idea to take two 2600s with that kit in. I showed it to Richard, and for the first time, I heard four-voice synthesizer sounds. And he actually did a concert with it. Of course, it's paraphonic in a sense, so he couldn't do really complicated stuff, but he was very good—he did a lot of Bach inventions and that kind of stuff. And when I heard that…

RG: It must have been incredible.

TO: I remember—one time I had dinner in Boston with Bob Moog, and we had a great time. We had a bit to drink, and we talked about it. He said, "Well, it's impossible to make a polyphonic synthesizer."

And I thought about that many times over the succeeding years. I think what Bob was concerned about is that there's no way to be able to play a chord on a keyboard without any instance where there's a problem of having the low note going to one voice, the second and third and fourth go to…you can't do it. It's impossible to do—you can split the keyboard, and you can do all kinds of stuff, but you can't make it like a piano or an organ.

RG: Sure. The problems of note detection and voice allocation in a system with limited sound sources are...well, they're very tricky.

TO: I think people accepted the fact that it wasn't possible. But, about the same time, I got to know Dave Rossum [of E-mu]. He and his partner Scott Wedge were just starting out. They were selling their big modular system, and he had designed a keyboard where he could pick out the notes using digital scanning and then run through D/A converters and put out multiple CVs and gates.

That was in the back of my mind, as well as the thing we did with Richard [Grayson], where we did that for four-voice paraphonic thing at one of his concerts. But in the meantime, I was building ring modulators, phase shifters, and sample & hold filter gadgets, and a big monster thing called the USS-1 synthesizer which had a bunch of stuff piled in it.

RG: That's right, the USS-1 was a sort of early "guitar synthesizer." It's really impressive—what a wild thing.

TO: I had a nice little business building pedals. And in the meantime, I'd kind of backed off from selling ARPs. I think, by then, they had a more big-time distribution arrangement.

But going back a few years, even though I was pretty burned out on digital stuff, in the middle of selling 2600s and Odysseys, I got this idea. Of course, I had seen "regular" sequencers at Paul Beaver's and at the UCLA electronic music lab. The sequencers I'd seen all had constant rhythm. In other words, it was just a clock running, and so every note had the same duration. And I thought, "You know, with digital circuitry, you could measure the time between key presses and then use a D-to-A converter to generate the CV." So I built this thing I called the DS-2 Digital Sequencer. And over the next few years, I sold two or three hundred of those.

But the problem with it was that if you only had one synthesizer—which was pretty common in those days—you could play your sequence on the keyboard and store it in the sequencer…

[Above: an excellent video by Hainbach covering the Oberheim DS-2A digital sequencer.]

RG: But then when the sequencer is running, what do you do with your keyboard?

TO: You couldn't do it! You had either listen to it and not play, or play and not use the sequencer. So I had this simple idea for making the world's simplest synthesizer. Now, I later found out that people all over the world found even simpler ways to make a synthesizer. But to me, you've got to have two oscillators. You've got to have a good filter. You've got to have two envelopes, et cetera, et cetera.

So I built the sequencer, but I realized this problem—and I thought, "I don't want to get in the synth business. [It's] not going to have a keyboard, just this little module that you can plug the sequencer into." So I did exactly that. I designed what we now call the SEM Synthesizer Expander Module. We sold them for that purpose—or if somebody wanted to beef up their up ARP 2600 or Odyssey or Minimoog, you could get a fatter sound. And I specifically put in a two-pole filter because it was different from what everybody had. Not because it was better or worse—it was a different sound.

[Above: detail of a vintage Oberheim SEM. Images from Perfect Circuit's archives.]

RG: What was the process of developing the SEM like?

TO: Later, as Oberheim was able to hire more engineers, I was able to pass off a lot of the engineering and design. But there's one thing that I'm proud of—it's that the sound of the SEM is mine.

Now, the way that happened—I got the idea for doing the SEM. By then, Jim Cooper was consulting for me. I wanted the best of everything. So I got Dave Rossum to design the VCO, and I got Dennis Colin, who designed the 2600, to design the two-pole filter. Jim Cooper put it all together. When the first prototype got all together, I thought it sounded pretty good…but I wasn't quite happy with it.

In those days, I had a little storefront—six or eight people were working there that were doing the pedals and stuff. And I rented a little room in this building in Santa Monica, and I had a soldering iron, headphones, and a bunch of resistors and capacitors. And for a good part of a week, I just experimented with—more than anything—the signal levels going through the filter and going through the VCA. Back and forth—I tried this, I tried that, and I eventually got the sound I liked. And that part, I can be proud of. That is the sound.

So, but then on January 25th, 1975, my good friend at Chicago Musical Instruments called up and said, "We're cancelling all the orders. Times are tough." By then, I had a few people working for me, and I had to think of what to do.

It didn't take very long to think of using Rossum's keyboard—or a version of it. By then, Jim Cooper was working at my company full-time. We had an agreement with Rossum to pay him a royalty; we took the Rossum keyboard, and we added some other features and four SEMs. It was just a very simple idea.

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[Above: an original Oberheim Two-Voice—the smallest member of Oberheim's first generation of polyphonic keyboard synthesizers based around the SEM architecture. Image via Perfect Circuit's archives.]

RG: Well, not so simple—you designed a polyphonic synthesizer. That was a big deal. Despite the fact that Moog had said it couldn't be done, you figured it out.

TO: Well, that's right. And from January 25th to late June of 1975—in just five months, I had a prototype which I showed at the summer NAMM in Chicago. In those days, at the NAMM show, the owners and managers of music stores would actually come to your booth and talk to you. The owner and manager of Manny's Music in New York came by my booth and said, "What is it?" And I said, "A synthesizer."

"Well, how much does it cost?" I said, oh, four or five thousand dollars. "There's nothing in my music store that costs that much!" Those are the days of Les Pauls for $800 new, right?

RG: How much would a 2600 have been at that time, for comparison's sake?

TO: I think they were $2,500 or $3,000. So yeah, they [the Oberheim polyphonic synthesizers] were expensive.

RG: So, who was buying the polyphonic systems at this time? Who was calling you up to buy, say, a Four Voice or an Eight Voice?

TO: I don't remember, because 1975 was such a crazy year—developing it, and then trying to get some of them built, and then fixing the problems. So I don't know who bought what. By then, I had a sales manager, and we were selling to music stores, so that connection wasn't direct. I had my head in and getting stuff out the door, so I wasn't really worrying too much about who got the first one.

RG: Regardless, people took to it. Those instruments wound up on some pretty incredible music.

TO: Yeah, I think it was a very select group—they were all great musicians, but it wasn't so much that. It was a pain to use, you know? It had 80 knobs and 30 switches and no patch storage…it was very hard to use. I think the people who used it did some great stuff in the '76 to 1980 timeframe, and then they pretty much left it alone. [laughs] Still, some great stuff. Some great stuff.

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[Above: detail of the Programmer module for Oberheim's early polyphonic SEM-based synthesizer systems. Image from Perfect Circuit's archives.]

RG: I'm curious about the programmer for the Four Voice and the other systems. That was in a time period when microprocessors were available, but that was still made with logic circuits, wasn't it?

TO: Oberheim Electronics, when I did the Programmer, did not have microprocessor capability. It was partly because it was new. The guy working for me didn't know much about them, and I didn't want to know anything about them. To me, the first ones that came out—for instance, the Z80, like…that's not a computer.

RG: Well, yeah, if you had already designed 24-bit computers in the '50s or '60s, then I'd understand not being so impressed.

TO: Yeah, that was a real computer. But…I was really good at throwing digital logic together, and it took me only a couple of days to design the Programmer.

The big thing about the Programmer was that I was able to talk Doug Curtis, who later became famous, but was not yet making any synthesizer chips. He was working as an engineer in one of the big companies. And the one thing, the only thing that would make [the Programmer] even sort of work was if we could make the envelope generators programmable.

RG: Right—because I'm sure you hadn't originally planned on the SEM's envelopes being voltage-controllable.

TO: So he designed a chip for me. The only place that chip was ever used was in my programmer—but it led up to the 3310, which he then went on to sell a lot of. The Programmer was very simple to put together. It did have some utility; it wasn't perfect, but it had some utility.

The major stumbling block to having microprocessor capability in the company kept me from immediately going into it, where Dave Smith—who really proved the utility of that—had been working at a couple of Silicon Valley companies making products that used microprocessors. So he had that capability and knew how to do it. But when the Prophet-5 hit—which was 1978—when me and the guys who were working for me saw that, we realized we had to do something.

And so we started another crash program at Oberheim, and we put together the OB-X in about seven months. That's when Oberheim really got in the synth business.

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[Above: an original Oberheim OB-X polyphonic synthesizer. Image via Perfect Circuit's archives.]

RG: Absolutely. And I mean, it became much more practical at that point, right? Using a microprocessor, you could make a much better user interface than was possible in the earlier polyphonic systems…

TO: Oh, yeah. All the basic stuff—you had to have it. Auto-tune, polyphony, patch storage, whatever.

RG: Yeah. And of course, what that means is that every storable aspect of the instrument needs to be voltage-controllable, right? So that's a big difference.

TO: Yeah, everything. Mixers as well as envelope generators and everything else.

Well, the Programmer for the Four-Voice kind of worked, because you did have VCOs, you did have the VCF, we got Doug Curtis to do the voltage-controlled envelopes. But the big thing that was missing was modulation switching and all that, which could have been done. I think that Jim Cooper and I could have done that, but not in the time frame that I set up for myself, which was just a few months. But they were fun days, I'll tell you that.

RG: Obviously, you had so much experience in the computer industry. I imagine that, when it became apparent that it was necessary, it wasn't that big of a stretch to make the leap into making a microprocessor-mediated instrument. Meaning, you saw the Prophet-5 coming out…

TO: Yeah, for me, it was going through this barrier of thinking this isn't a real computer! And of course, that was not a profitable, sensible thing on my part, but I just didn't want to deal with it. And I didn't have to deal with it because in the end, Jim Cooper did all the work of getting our microprocessor capability going. He did all of that.

And then as I started to sell OB-X's and things started to happen, the company grew up—I continually didn't have to deal with it.

[Above: the Oberheim OB-8 and OB-Xa—revolutionary polyphonic synthesizers that followed closely on the heels of the OB-X. Images via Perfect Circuit's archives.]

RG: I'm curious what the culture was like among synthesizer designers at the time. I imagine to some extent you must have been looking at what everyone else was doing—but I don't know whether you would have seen them more as competitors or peers. There weren't that many of you working at the time.

TO: Well, from a macroscopic point of view…when Dave [Smith] did the Prophet-5, we had to do a similar thing, and that was the OB-X.

However, the one thing I did do in that age—the short age we're talking about, of the OB stuff—I designed the user interface. So when you look at an OB-X, OB-Xa, OB-8, and more recently the OB-X8, it's that layout. That layout was mine, and it was my experience with the ARP 2600—where you just go across the panel, you see the VCOs, VCFs, you see the envelopes. It doesn't look like a 2600, but that was my thinking.

I remember when I started selling ARP and I got my first 2600, it came with a manual. I knew I wanted to sell them, and I thought I could sell them, but I didn't consider myself an expert. But it came with a very nice manual, and the first thing in that manual is the basic patch. And when I read that, it all made perfect sense. And so that was in my mind when I did the OB-X front panel.

Anyway, from the end of 1979 up to 1985, we just expanded. We did the stuff that everybody wanted, you know, a polyphonic synthesizer—a drum machine. We were competitors, technically, but I'd say for the most part, in the half-decade beginning in 1982 and ending in the end of 1985, whether it was Sequential or Linn Electronics, or whatever—we could sell everything we could make. And so, we were never knock-down, drag-out competitors. Typically, at NAMM shows through that period of time, Roger [Linn] and I, and usually Dave [Smith] and sometimes [Ikutaro] Kakehashi-san, would end up at some place where we had a little party. We did things that we felt were the right things to do, not so much [because of] what other people were doing. We were all good friends.

But I'd say that the basic thing was that we could all pretty much sell everything that we could make. Up until the time that Oberheim Electronics ended, in May of 1985, we never had one piece of gear in stock. And that was probably the case for Dave [Smith], too. Occasionally we might talk about some technical thing, but we each did things our own way.

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[Above: A young Marcus Ryle (left), with Professor Richard Bunger Evans (right) in the Cal State Dominguez Hills synthesizer lab, c. 1979. Image courtesy of Marcus Ryle.]

And then, it just seemed natural—well, if you've got a polyphonic synthesizer, you need a polyphonic sequencer. And so that started another little thread of the story, when I met Marcus Ryle as a 19-year-old "kid."

RG: Right. We actually spoke with Marcus recently about his history at Oberheim—and his many other ventures, of course.

TO: He wanted to work at a synthesizer company, and I was the only game in town. He was a fantastic keyboard player, doing professional jobs in studios at 19 years old. But we had a discussion, and his first job at Oberheim Electronics was the DSX [polyphonic digital sequencer], which is not a trivial machine.

But, we could sell everything we could make, whether it was a polyphonic synthesizer, a sequencer, a drum machine. We did a few other things. But basically, I'd say that we listened to what musicians had to say; but it was changing so fast that we weren't guided by what musicians wanted so much—because technical innovations were a situation where…very few professional musicians had time for that. They were happy to see what we did, and of course, it was up to us to combine, you know, microprocessors and memories and all the other stuff together.

RG: Right. I suppose that the needs of musicians aren't necessarily driven by the advancements in technology, specifically. They just want instruments that work well and sound good.

TO: Yeah, exactly.

RG: So—obviously the DMX, your sample-based drum machine, was a huge hit. Was there ever a temptation to apply digital audio techniques your synthesizers as well? Or was that just not on your to-do list?

TO: Well, my attitude toward it was that, although the technology and microprocessors had come along to help us, the area of DSP was not that developed in the late 1970s. So I think that the flurry of analog stuff from 1970 to 1985 then became dominated from '85 on to 2000 by advances in software—and certainly in the technology that you need to do DSP.

And, I think that when you combine that with the workstation concept—by the late '80s, everybody wanted an M1 or a D-50. I don't think any large company by 1990 was selling analog synths. Dave [Smith] was off doing other stuff, and I was off doing other stuff. I'm sure there were still people making analog synths, but that isn't what made our little industry grow. It was the workstation concept, which took a lot more development than Oberheim could afford, for sure. But anyway, Oberheim belonged to somebody else by the end of '85. But it was harder to sell analog synthesizers in the late 1980s.

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[Above: the Oberheim DMX, a sample-based digital drum machine from the early 1980s. Image via Perfect Circuit's archives.]

RG: Sure. It's a somewhat complicated topic. I think that often, when people talk about the state of the synthesizer industry as it was in the '80s, everyone points to the Yamaha DX-7 as being "the thing that changed at all." But it seems to me like analog synth sales still went fine after the DX-7 came along, at least for a while.

TO: Okay, and as the DX-7 was about to come out, everybody knew it was coming out, and that it used F.M., invented by John Chowning at Stanford. And a little side note, listening to numerous things where John Chowning spoke, he got a patent on that, which was assigned to Stanford. He and/or Stanford went to the musical electronic companies in the United States—Lowrey Organ, that kind of company—but nobody in the U.S. wanted it. But Yamaha came along, and of course, they had to put a lot of work into it to make it a product.

But I knew an engineer at Ensoniq, and I ran into him at NAMM. He said, "Well, Tom, you know, you shouldn't wait. You need to shut down your company now, because when the DX-7 comes out, it's over for you." I said, "Well, I'm not sure about that."

In fact, what happened was that, for the next three years after the DX-7 came out, Oberheim's sales grew 35% a year. My theory is that the DX-7 legitimized the synthesizer. Now you could see synthesizers in bar bands, you see them at weddings, and not just concerts by the rich rock-and-rollers. The DX-7 was definitely not the cause of Oberheim's demise at all.

RG: Yeah. I think it's exactly like you're saying. The DX-7 was comparatively affordable. It could do a lot. And that meant that it got used a lot. But I think that the musicians that got one and took things really seriously…they probably looked toward other instruments that had better user interfaces and just moved on to those next. It was sort of a rising tide, in a sense.

TO: Yeah. Of course, the thing that dominated and grew the synthesizer field starting in the early 1970s is that they were all sold through music stores, and if it wasn't a profitable thing, music stores couldn't afford to deal with them. And as you got into the late 1980s, I'm sure that there were times when stores couldn't get M1s or D-50s, but they just took over everything.

I tried another synth in the 1990s, but it wasn't successful, and I think Dave [Smith] went into other things. Moog was in and out, but the stuff that was coming from Japan was really ruling what happened. I won't say this is the whole picture, but they had the resources to develop larger machines that can do more. I was pretty much out of it by the 1990s.

RG: So, then, we have this idea that the workstation modality really changed the synthesizer industry; in the '90s, that kind of takes over, and then personal computers develop to a point that they can start to handle most of the tasks that a workstation can. Do you have any thoughts about what made analog synthesizers attractive again? And what brought you back into it?

TO: Well…I don't have a general philosophical answer, but in my case, bringing back the SEM—that was just Roger [Linn] getting on my case. It was not my idea, but I did it. [Starting in] 2009, for three or four years, I sold about a thousand of them—and it was fun. It wasn't hard to do; they weren't very complicated.

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[Above: a modern Oberheim SEM Pro. Image via Perfect Circuit's archives.]

The only thing I can attribute the rebirth of analog to is that the people involved—some of [whom] I know, and some of [whom] I don't know—just have…an artistic bent. To put the right things together.

I can think of a lot of cases, but one of them—one of my best friends, who worked at Oberheim back in our heyday, is a marketing guy, and about five years ago, he told me that he had taken on the distribution in the USA of this little company from Bristol—UDO. I asked my friend what it was, and he described it pretty much as a regular, straightforward analog synthesizer—but when I saw it, I knew it would be a success. To begin, it just looks nice. It looks like something you want to play. And I guess that it has been pretty successful. I haven't met George [Hearn], the guy who designed it, but maybe someday. Same way with my friend, Bob Coover. He brought out this instrument that looks like a PPG—the Third Wave. It looks right and sounds right.

I don't have a philosophical answer for what makes one [instrument] do well, and another one not do well. Just in my case, I think it was largely was due to luck and timing—when people needed something, I just happened to be doing it.

RG: I'm curious to know more about the experience of bringing the Oberheim brand back to life the past several years.

TO: It's been fun to watch. The really interesting thing was how the OB-X8 came about: it was the idea of finding a way to bring all three of the major Oberheim synths back in one. [The OB-X8] is truly a Sequential machine, especially in terms of the control circuitry. Because Dave [Smith] and his engineer Tony have really modernized the way to develop the control voltages, and that's a big part of it, from my point of view.

But the thing that was really interesting about the OB-X8 is that Sequential got Marcus Ryle involved. Marcus has one of everything Oberheim. As they developed the OB-X8, Marcus took on the job of making them have three modes in the machine—each mode was based on a specific machine, the OB-X, OB-Xa, or OB-8. The biggest problem they had, if I understand it right, was with the envelope generators, because they used different basic technology in each of the three machines. The OB-X8, of course—it's a monster. It's fabulous, I mean.

And I think it's just a matter of the way things fall into place. One of the major things that happened in our little industry was that Focusrite bought Sequential a few years ago. And then, I was able to get the trademarks for Oberheim and the Oberheim name back; and then my name was bought by Focusrite, and so on. And I'm very close to the people at Sequential—I go over and see them every once in a while, but I consider myself retired.

RG: Sure. Well, you've done a lot—and you're doing a lot for someone who's supposedly retired.

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TO: I don't have the pressure I had in the garage of our house, here. Since we moved in 1991, I completely took over the garage, except for a little room for the washer and dryer. Of course, I was able to use that to bring back the SEM, the SEM Pro, and another machine which I never finished—which was essentially a totally programmable SEM that had all the necessary circuits so that you can simulate just about every pedal made. That's not going to see the light of day, [but it] would have been interesting to see. But we'll never know.

But I think that the thing that's most gratifying has nothing to do with just me, but everybody that has been involved. It's just that synthesizers are part of our musical life now. People don't argue over analog and digital—they don't argue over filters, or whatever. They're just part of our life, and you can have five of them if you want, if you've got the money. And a lot of people do.

We've gotten through that stage now, and if you hear music on a record or in a movie, you don't think, "Well, whose synthesizer is that?" It doesn't matter. If they're any good, they'll be useful to somebody. And that's what we found. A lot of synthesizers have come and gone, and I won't get into why that is, but I'm proud of the fact that a lot of people like the sound of Oberheim.