We put together a series of articles about the history of electronic music and MIDI. Here are links to the series. The History of MIDI from 850 AD to the present MIDI History:Chapter 1- 850 AD to 1850 AD - To really understand the origins of MIDI, you need to go all the way back to before there were digitally controlled synthesizers and c...
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...
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...
Dave Smith was born in San Francisco in 1950 and like Dave Rossum grew up in the Bay Area in the 1950s. He took piano lessons as a child and started playing bass and guitar in rock bands in high school because it was after all the 1960s in San Francisco. When the record Switched on Bach came out in 1968, Dave bo...
MIDI in 1983 - It seems to work, but what's next? In Chapter 6 of the History of MIDI, we left off with the demonstration of MIDI at the 1983 NAMM show. John Bowen, head of sound design for Sequential had recounted that he had been busy finishing the presets for the Prophet 600 and that although Sequential had tested the Prophet 60...
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 ...
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 s...
Ikutaro Kakehashi was certainly one of the most influential figures in electronic music in the 20th century. He influenced music and technology throughout his lifetime. He overcame many challenges in his early life to become the head of one of the most influential electronic musical instruments companies in the world, Roland C...
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 pe...
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 Mu...
