Legendary engineer Tom Oberheim’s synths and drum machines have appeared on countless records, like “Blue Monday” and “Human Nature”. But what does Tom think of them? We sat down with him to find out.
Few people have influenced music in the way that Tom Oberheim has. Since he started making effects pedals for Maestro in the late 1960s, and then instruments under his own name, his musical inventions have appeared on songs by Prince, New Order, Michael Jackson, and many more. But what does the man himself think of how his synthesizers and drum machines like the Four Voice, OB-Xa and DMX have been used? We sat down with him on a recent morning at Oberheim’s headquarters in San Francisco to find out.
Prince: 1999 (OB-Xa)
Attack: Prince was a big Oberheim fan. He used them starting with the Four Voice, and he used the OB-Xa on “1999”. Do you have any indication of why he liked Oberheim more than others?
TO: I should say that in the days from when things started to happen in the mid ‘70s, when we had the Four Voice and Eight Voice, and then our reaction to the (Sequential) Prophet-5 when we brought out the OB-X, OB-Xa, OB-8, Expander, Matrix-12, DMX, DSX, all of that, I was running the company, and I didn’t hear any of this stuff in those days, because I wasn’t into that kind of music at all.
Occasionally, maybe one of the marketing guys would say, so-and-so’s done this great thing using the OB-Xa or whatever, and I’d listen to it, but because I had a company to run…
You ever heard of the Peter Principle? The Peter Principle says that in an organization, people advance until they’ve reached their level of incompetence. That was me running a company. As things went along, I did less and less (designing). Jim Cooper and I designed the OB-X in record time, because the Prophet-5 was killing us, and we had to do something.
When we did the OB-Xa, it was a step up using Curtis chips. And then by the time of the OB-8… There was another redesign that I didn’t have anything to do with. I did the front panel on all the Oberheim stuff up to the Expander. But I just got more and more busy. And so your question was, what is my impression of hearing this stuff?
I never took that philosophical approach. I’ll tell you why. I was excited to do the Four Voice. I was kind of pushed into it on one hand, but on the other hand, I was excited about it
Yeah, when you hear a song that uses your instrument, do you think, oh, that’s one of ours?
No, that’s not the first thing I think of. I think my attitude then, and pretty much my attitude now, is if somebody’s playing a synthesizer—back in the day there were four or five companies, and now there’s 30, 40 companies—it’s (just) a synthesizer. The last half of my life, or more, was synthesizers. I’m just glad to hear somebody doing something nice with a synthesizer. Then I might try to find out what it is. I don’t always do that, though.
Sometimes, I know it. You know, polyphonic portamento in the 1970s and early 1980s, I know that’s one of mine, because the Four Voice was the only one (that could do it).
But occasionally, I’d get to know a musician that used my stuff.
Michael Jackson: Human Nature (Four Voice)
Speaking of the Four Voice and polyphonic portamento, Steve Porcaro played one on “Human Nature”.
I wasn’t a Michael Jackson fan, so I wasn’t real familiar with the music in its heyday, but there’s certainly a lot of nice Four Voice on this.
From 1959 to about 1968, I was in designing computer-type stuff. I knew digital logic really well, and I knew about sequencers. At that time, sequencers had knobs, and your timing was fixed, and you could change the length of a loop, but you couldn’t do (much else). I had this idea for a sequencer that you could load from the keyboard. I made this thing called the DS-2, and I sold quite a few of those.
But the problem was, in those days, if a keyboard player had a synthesizer, (they) usually had only one. If you had a synthesizer and my sequencer, you could either play your synthesizer or play the sequencer, but you couldn’t do both. So I came up with this idea to make an absolute bare-bottom synthesizer module, the absolute minimum, the SEM (Synthesizer Expander Module).
The idea was I’d sell it to somebody who’s already got a synthesizer. It made the sound bigger, you could have different waveforms. It had a two-pole filter rather than four-pole, just for variety. It was just something to help you with your 2600, Minimoog or Odyssey or whatever.
(Then on) January 25th, 1975, Maestro calls and cancels all our orders for my pedals, and I had to do something. And knowing that E-mu had a digital keyboard that I could license and having the SEMs, I decided to make the Four Voice. I started that on the first of February, and had a prototype at the NAMM show the following June. Five months.
X-102: OBX-A (OB-Xa)
A lot of your polys like the OB-Xa are famous for having a really big sound. Is that something that you aimed for? Did you consciously say, I want to make a big sound?
I never took that philosophical approach. I’ll tell you why. I was excited to do the Four Voice. I was kind of pushed into it on one hand, but on the other hand, I was excited about it.
A good friend of mine, Richard, a musician who I met at UCLA, in the music department, asked me to join him. Normally, he did concerts where he improvised. He’s a fantastic keyboard player. I was starting to build ring modulators (for Maestro), and we talked about it. I became part of his yearly concert he did. He did one a year, where I built this conglomeration of two ring modulators, a Revox (reel-to-reel tape recorder) with speed control with a foot pedal, and the one ring modulator had a foot pedal for the carrier, and a mixer to mix all this stuff together. It allowed him to do live electronic music, and it was pretty interesting.
I had this idea for one of the concerts because I was selling ARP 2600s as a dealer, and I figured out how to generate two control voltages on a keyboard. I didn’t invent that because ARP had that facility for the 2500, the big unit, and the circuit board for that was also on a circuit board in the bend box of the 2600, and I’d sometimes have to open it up and fix something. I saw this on the circuit board. Of course, it had the circuitry for the wheels, but there were these places for parts, (but) there were no parts in there, and I figured it out, and it was a scheme to generate two CVs from a regular synthesizer keyboard that has a string of resistors.
I put together a situation where I had two 2600s, both had the two-CV kit, and I gave it to Richard. He started playing some Bach inventions, and I heard those four-note chords, I said, my God. I was thinking about that when I decided to do the Four Voice. It’s a big sound.
Over the years, that’s where the Four Voice, and Eight Voice, and OB-X, and on and on, thrived, was in a big sound. Sort of an orchestral sound, if you want. I think I could say I was the first to have a polyphonic machine that you could buy in a music store.
New Order: Blue Monday (DMX)
“Blue Monday”, I can (hear it), of course. That’s a DMX.
What kind of music do you like personally?
I grew up listening to jazz back in junior high. I pretty much stayed with that up through into the 1960s, when I had moved to Cali. Over the years, as I went through all these different periods of listening to jazz a lot, then certain rock groups would do things that I found interesting. Then, for a period of time, for several years, all I listened to was ambient.
That’s the only music I could work to. I can’t design, write code or design circuits or conceive products with most of the music I like. There’s some really great ambient stuff that uses synths. Beautiful stuff done in that field.
Are there any artists in particular that you can think of?
No. Most of them, I didn’t even know who they were because what I listened to was a thing that was on the internet, that was done by a guy in England. And he had perfect taste for ambient for me.
You can’t simply design what the musician wants, because he or she may not know all the possibilities
Rush: Tom Sawyer (OB-X)
Of course, “Tom Sawyer” needs no discussion.
When you design an instrument, do you think about what someone might want to do with it, or do you just sort of present a lot of parameters and hope that people will find their way?
No, I think what it is is, first of all, you can’t simply design what the musician wants, because he or she may not know all the possibilities. And on the other hand, you can’t spend all your time only worrying about the oscillator drift and the power supply and all that. You have to do this gray-area thing.
Of course, I didn’t invent the synthesizer. The SEM is nothing but a copy of the Odyssey or a copy of the Minimoog, or a little mixture*. But I loved it, and so I wanted to do it. I think, of course, the polyphonic thing was interesting, but it was just a very short prelude to where everything was polyphonic.
I think that we were driven more than anything by, number one, reliability. The fortunate thing was, for me, when I designed the SEM, I designed the front panel. I did the power supply. The VCOs were designed by Dave Rossum (of E-mu). The filter was designed by the guy that designed the ARP 2600, Dennis Colin. And Jim Cooper did the envelope generators. My contribution to the SEM was that it’s the cheapest, simplest synthesizer that’s still usable.
(*Tom is being modest, in my opinion. The SEM, Odyssey and Minimoog all have distinct sounds that are as different as Strats and Les Pauls, and are just as iconic. This was definitely a stellar team of contributors to the SEM, but Tom is the one who chose all of them and he managed the overall vision of the instrument. The sound that the SEM established for the Oberheim brand is the sound that the world fell in love with and it continues to this day. In fact, it’s a major selling point for our latest release, the TEO-5 synthesizer, which at around $300 per voice is the most cost-effective way to get the genuine Oberheim synth sound today.—Taiho Yamada, Head of Marketing, Sequential and Oberheim)
Herbie Hancock: Rockit (DMX)
I’m convinced that there’s no Oberheim on “Rockit”. I played it a couple times. I looked it up on the internet. I couldn’t find any mention that there’s an Oberheim in that. I certainly don’t hear it.
(The DMX is listed on the credits for “Rockit” but it’s possible that Herbie and Bill Laswell used different EEPROMs instead of the standard DMX sounds.—Ed.)
You mentioned you liked jazz. Did you like what the jazz guys did in the ‘70s with synthesizers, like Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul, that kind of fusion style?
Although I knew Herbie—if he walked in, he’d know me, and I’d know him, and we’d talk—Joe Zawinul’s a different story, if you want to hear it.
I first became acquainted with Joe Zawinul when he was a keyboard player with Cannonball Adderley. The first time I heard anything electronic and jazz was people that were playing their Rhodes piano through one of my ring modulators.
I got a phone call one day. It’s Joe Zawinul. He said, “Tom, I just bought one of your Eight Voice synthesizers.” I was kind of shocked because it’s a monster thing.
In those days, Joe was living in Pasadena, just above the Rose Bowl. He said, “Could you come out and show me something about this?” I said, sure. Well, Joe, the pitch you get with the oscillator, we call them VCOs, and then you can change the sound here with the filter, and you can get the filter to do strange things if you do the resonance. And then, of course, you’ve got attack, the ongoing attack and decay. We went through this for a couple of hours. He’d say, yes, yes, and finally we were done.
It was about 45 minutes from Joe’s place to where I live in Santa Monica, so I’m driving home thinking, he’s going to take it back (to the store).
A few weeks later, he calls me up and says, “Tom, you’ve got to hear this sound I got on your machine.” I’m thinking, what? We didn’t have a manual then of any sort. I went back out to his house, and he played me a rough mix of “Birdland”. I just died on the spot.
It was a learning experience for me because there’s a very specific difference between engineering and music creation. Of course, they blend together, but I can’t use my engineering background to judge musical stuff, especially when you have a creative musician whose creativity is different from this guy over here. I learned from that a lesson about what creative people do with the instruments I make.
