Joe Abbati is a creative technologist/educator/electronic musician based in Miami. He has been a faculty member in the Music Engineering Technology Program at the highly acclaimed Frost S...
Keith Alexander played the important role of Director of Operations for the Los Angeles-based swing band, the Big Band Alumni. The band, whose leader is Bill A. Jones, was established in ...
Marco Alpert has had a fascinating career in the music industry and lucky for the NAMM Oral History collection he shared many of his stories with us. Marco was an electronic music compose...
Mark Altekruse, like so many passionate members of the music industry, specifically remembers the lessons he learned from one of his earliest and most influential music instructors. Tromb...
Dave Amels is a huge fan of the Hammond B-3 organ, which he’s played on records and with garage rock bands including Husky Team and The Reigning Sound. In the late ’80s he co-founded Voce...
Rick Anderson was in a MBA program that required he write a research paper about a local business. This was his introduction to the Rodgers Instrument Corporation located in Hillsboro, Or...
Craig Anderton was among a very small group of engineers at the dawn of the synthesizer revolution during the 1970s that was in the position to report, educate and compose music based on ...
Richard Bates devoured each and every record album with Moog synthesizers in the 1960s and early 70s. He was fascinated by the famous Hooked On Bach album by Wendy Carlos and took a great...
Bryan Bell was given the task of engineering a working synthesizer using all of Herbie Hancock’s favorite keyboards back in the early 1970s, well before MIDI. Herbie’s single instruction ...
Athan Billias had a rather impressive vantage point to witness the growth and development of the synthesizer in the late 1970s and early 80s. After performing as a professional musician i...
John Bowen was an engineer at Sequential Circuits during the early days of the synthesizer boom of the late 1970s. John worked with founder Dave Smith, who later went on to develop the Mu...
James Brady was front and center during the MIDI boom, working within the keyboard department at Rushworth’s Music House in Liverpool. The year was 1986 and the synthesizer was at its pea...
Evan Brooks became interested in electronic musical instruments during the early days of synthesizer development. He worked on MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) controllers for ...
Pete Brown is a Principal Software Engineer in Windows at Microsoft and oversees the company’s MIDI 2.0 implementation. He grew up in Massachusetts and was introduced to synthesizers whil...
Don Buchla grew up with a passion for music and a passion for engineering. When he combined the two loves, he created electronic musical instruments the world had never dreamed of before....
Christoph Bull is the organ professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His deep passion for music stems from his grandmother’s piano and his early days playing organ i...
Avery Burdette, the product manager for Yamaha Corporation of America, began his long love of music pushing down the pedals of his mother's organ as a small child while his mother played....
Phil Burk has had a passion for electronics since he was a kid growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He built radio circuits before he was a teen and combined that interest with his l...
Ryan Clement was among the first employees at Grandma’s Music in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Established by Micky Patten in 1986, the store gained a strong reputation for selling pro audio a...
Christy Coobatis is a college music professor whose amazing musical journey includes playing professionally before he was a teenager, beta testing guitars for Leo Fender, and helping to c...
Ed Cornett was hired by Yamaha to head the team in charge of creating the DX7. His story of the long hours, creative and innovative team members and the support of the company uncover th...
Peggy Dahl-Bartunek grew up with four siblings who all took piano lessons – they even had two pianos in their house! Since the fifth grade, Peggy knew that she wanted to be a teacher and ...
Arthur Dark grew up in a musical household thanks to his parents. Arthur dabbled with the violin when he was 4 years old, but was quickly drawn to the piano around age 5 or 6. After a tim...
Paul de Benedictis recalls the day he was working along side software designer Dave Oppenheim when a series of commands were created to allow a drum machine to sync to Dave's MIDIMAC Sequ...
Guy Desjardins was composing and arranging music as technology in musical instruments was changing. His adaptation of these developments resulted in his nickname of Mr. MIDI. He was hired...
Herbert Deutsch was down in Robert Moog’s basement when the two men were redrafting the design of an electronic synthesizer in the early 1960s. Herb suggested that the modular unit with p...
Craig Doerge played keyboards in the famous group of Los Angeles based studio musicians known as The Section. The Section, which also included Leland Sklar, Russ Kunkel and Danny Kortchma...
Pat Downes combined his engineering background with his passion for music to create the electronic air drums. Forming the company Palm Tree Instruments, Pat became an inventor in the wor...
Barb Fairhurst was hired by Dave Smith to manage the business elements of his newly-formed company he called Sequential Circuits, back in 1977. The following year, the company released it...
Gregory Farmer is an enthusiastic, talented, self-taught synthesist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, performer, and producer. He has collected and plays a wide range of electronic and ac...
Larry Fast is best known as the innovative keyboardist and synthesizer composer who helped bring electronic musical instruments into pop music, beginning in the 1970s. His Synergy series ...
Bobby Fernandez grew up surrounded by music and developed an interest in film music at a young age. He always felt drawn to the film industry and more specifically the recording side of t...
