Oberheim Electronics, Inc.

Oberheim Electronics was founded in 1969 by American designer Tom Elroy Oberheim (born 1936 in Manhattan, Kansas), who had formerly worked as a contractor with the revered Maestro manufacturer and distributor of guitar effects pedals and amplifiers. Oberheim’s design and engineering career began with a relocation to Los Angeles while in his early twenties, where he studied computer engineering, physics, and music at the University of California, Los Angeles. It was through a meeting with trumpeter Don Ellis and keyboardist Joseph Byrd during his final semester of classes that Oberheim was able to combine his interests in physics and music, constructing a series of amplifiers and basic ring modulator effects for the musicians to use. The latter unit, his ring modulator, was picked up by Chicago Musical Instruments (CMI) in 1969, who offered him a manufacturing contract; the unit was marketed under the Maestro subsidiary. He also produced a hugely successful phase shifter unit for CMI, which was released as the Maestro PS-1.

In around 1971, Oberheim approached ARP founder Alan Pearlman at the NAMM trade show, resulting in Oberheim Electronics becoming the first distributor of ARP synthesizers on the west coast. As such, he developed a burgeoning interest in synthesizer design and engineering, and the DS-2 sequencer emerged in 1973, incorporating early digital technologies to offer comprehensive control of the unit. In conjunction with the sequencer, Oberheim designed a synthesizer module with the help of with E-Mu Systems engineer Dave Rossum, which became known as the Synthesizer Expander Module, or SEM. The SEM, which debuted at the Audio Engineering Society (AES) meeting in Los Angeles in May 1974, was the first product to be officially released under the ‘Oberheim Electronics’ banner, and became his main focus from 1975 onward. In that year, Oberheim sought to employ multiple SEM units into a single integrated synthesizer that, combined with early digital-scanning keyboard technology developed and licensed by Rossum and Scott Wedge at E-Mu, would function as a polyphonic instrument. The results of these experiments were the Two- and Four-Voice synthesizers, which offered two- and four-voice polyphony, respectively, as well as a programmable architecture via the Polyphonic Synthesizer Programmer module, which employed basic integrated circuitry. The massive Eight-Voice, which incorporated eight independent SEM units housed within a single enclosure, followed in 1977. The Polyphonic Synthesizer Programmer was eventually fully integrated into the OB1, also of 1977, making it the first programmable monophonic synthesizer. A digital sequencer, the DSX, and a sample-based drum machine, the DMX, followed in the early 1980s as pre-MIDI accompaniments to Oberheim ‘OB’ synthesizers, which included the OB-X of 1979, the OB-Xa of 1981, and the OB8 of 1983. By 1985, the company had shifted ownership for financial reasons and was eventually sold to the Gibson Guitar Company. Tom Oberheim left in 1987, forming Marion Systems in Lafayette, California, while also consulting for Roland and Akai. In 2000, he founded SeaSound, a manufacturer of audio interfaces, and, in 2010, he resurrected Oberheim Electronics with a series of reissues of original Oberheim products, including the SEM, Two-Voice, and Four-Voice, as well as a collaborative voltage-controlled polyphonic synthesizer with designer Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits and Dave Smith Instruments, dubbed the OB6. Oberheim Electronics is currently based in Oakland, California.

Tom Oberheim was also a pivotal member in the development of the hugely influential MIDI protocol in the early 1980s. Pioneered by Dave Smith, and with the help of Oberheim, Ikutaro Kakehashi of Roland, and representatives from Korg and Kawai, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface was consecrated at NAMM in 1983 with a Roland Jupiter 6 and a Sequential Circuits Prophet 600 making the first successful connection. Oberheim is also a member of the Berkeley-based ‘Dead President’s Society’, which also includes the late Max Mathews who is regarded as the father of computer music and namesake to the max/MSP programming environment, Roger Linn of Linn Electronics, Donald Buchla of Buchla & Associates, Keith McMillen of Keith McMillen Instruments, Perrin Meyer of the Meyer Sound pro-audio company, Dave Smith of Dave Smith Instruments and Sequential Circuits, John Chowning who is regarded as the inventor of the FM synthesis algorithm Yamaha employed in their hugely successful DX7 digital synthesizer, and the late David Wessel who was the director and co-founder of the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT).