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NAMM Oral History
The NAMM Oral History Program is an oral history project and archive of recordings of interviews with people from all aspects of the music products industry, including music instrument retailers, musical instrument and product creators, suppliers and sales representatives, music educators and advocates, publishers, live sound and recording pioneers, innovators, founders, and musicians. Established in 2000 by NAMM: The International Music Products Association to preserve the history of the music products industry as well as improve music education worldwide, the program includes over 5,000 audio or video interviews available to the public via online streaming. Background In 1996, NAMM established the NAMM Resource Center to preserve the history of the music products industry. In 2000 the Oral History Program was founded, with Dan Del Fiorentino, NAMM Music Historian and former curator of the NAMM Foundation's Museum of Making Music as lead interviewer. The first NAMM Oral Hi ...
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Karl Denson
Karl Denson (born December 27, 1956) is an American funk and jazz saxophonist, flutist and vocalist from Santa Ana, California. He plays with The Rolling Stones, and leads his own group, Karl Denson's Tiny Universe (KDTU). He co-founded The Greyboy Allstars (GBA), and continues to tour with both KDTU and GBA as well as The Rolling Stones. Formerly, Denson was a member of Lenny Kravitz's band and he has recorded with artists including Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland, Slightly Stoopid, Blind Boys of Alabama, Blackalicious, Stanton Moore, and Jon Foreman of the band Switchfoot. Denson appears in the 1988 movie ''Coming To America'' and in the 2021 sequel Coming 2 America as the saxophonist in the fictional band Sexual Chocolate. Current members of KDTU include Denson (saxophone, flute, vocals, percussion), Ricio Fruge (trumpet, percussion), Ricky Giordano (guitar), Rashon Murph (keyboards), Parker McAllister (bass), Alfred Jordan (drums), and Danielle Barker (vocals). Selected ...
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Korg
, founded as Keio Electronic Laboratories, is a Japanese multinational corporation that manufactures electronic musical instrument An electronic musical instrument or electrophone is a musical instrument that produces sound using electronics, electronic circuitry. Such an instrument sounds by outputting an electrical, electronic or digital audio signal that ultimately is ...s, audio processors and guitar pedals, recording equipment, and electronic tuners. Under the Vox brand name, they also manufacture guitar amplifiers and electric guitars. History KORG was founded in 1962 in Tokyo by Tsutomu Kato and Tadashi Osanai as ''Keio Gijutsu Kenkyujo Ltd.''. It later became because its offices were located near the Keio train line in Tokyo and Keio can be formed by combining the first letters of Kato and Osanai. Before founding the company, Kato ran a nightclub. Osanai, a Tokyo University graduate and noted accordionist, regularly performed at Kato's club accompanie ...
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Guitar Center
Guitar Center, Inc. is an American musical instrument retailer chain headquartered in Westlake Village, California. It operates 304 locations and is the largest company of its kind in the United States. The company oversees several subsidiaries, including Musician's Friend, AVDG, Music & Arts, Woodwind & Brasswind, and Giardinelli. History Guitar Center was founded in Hollywood in 1959 by Wayne Mitchell as The Organ Center, a retailer of electronic organs for home and church use. In 1964, after a supplier required him to carry Vox guitar amplifiers, to continue receiving organs, Mitchell added the amplifiers to his inventory and renamed the store The Vox Center, leveraging the Beatles' association with the Vox brand. In the late 1960s, as other brands like Marshall gained popularity, Mitchell renamed the store Guitar Center. By 1972, Guitar Center had expanded to eight locations, including stores in San Francisco, San Diego and suburbs of Los Angeles. In the late 19 ...
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Kawai Musical Instruments
is a musical instrument manufacturing company headquartered in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, Japan. It is best known for its grand pianos, upright pianos, digital pianos, electronic keyboards and electronic synthesizers. The company was founded in August 1927. History Koichi Kawai, the company founder, was born in Hamamatsu, Japan in 1886. His neighbor, Torakusu Yamaha, a watchmaker and reed organ builder, took him in as an apprentice. Kawai became a member of the research and development team that introduced pianos to Japan. Yamaha died in 1916, and in the 1920s the piano industry faltered in Japan. New management took over control of Yamaha's company, Nippon Gakki Co. (later renamed the Yamaha Corporation), and began to diversify its production line. This led Kawai to leave Nippon Gakki in 1927 and found the Kawai Musical Instrument Research Laboratory. After Koichi Kawai's death in 1955, his son, Shigeru Kawai became company president at 33 and expanded production facilities. In ...
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Meyer Sound Laboratories
Meyer Sound Laboratories is an American company based in Berkeley, California that manufactures self-powered loudspeakers, multichannel audio show control systems, electroacoustic architecture, and audio analysis tools for the professional sound reinforcement, fixed installation, and sound recording industries. The company's emphasis on research and measurement has resulted in the issuance of dozens of patents, including for the now-standard trapezoidal loudspeaker cabinet shape. Meyer Sound has pioneered other technologies that have become standard in the audio industry, including: processor-controlled loudspeaker systems, self-powered loudspeakers, curvilinear arraying, cardioid subwoofers, and source independent measurement. Some symphony halls and performing arts facilities utilize Meyer Sound products, such as the rehearsal area at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, Svetlanov Hall in Moscow, Russia, and the Musikverein in Vienna, Austria. Meyer Sound's Constellation ac ...
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Steinway & Sons
Steinway & Sons, also known as Steinway (), is a German-American piano company, founded in 1853 in New York City by German piano builder Henry E. Steinway, Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg (later known as Henry E. Steinway). The company's growth led to a move to a larger factory in New York, and later opening an additional factory in Hamburg, Germany. The New York factory, in the borough of Queens, supplies the Americas, and the factory in Hamburg supplies the rest of the world. Steinway is a prominent piano company, known for its high quality and for inventions within the area of piano development. Steinway has been granted 139 patents in piano making, with the first in 1857. The company's share of the high-end grand piano market consistently exceeds 80 percent. The dominant position has been criticized, with some musicians and writers arguing that it has blocked innovation and led to a homogenization of the sound favored by pianists. Steinway pianos have received numerous aw ...
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Henry E
Henry may refer to: People and fictional characters * Henry (given name), including lists of people and fictional characters * Henry (surname) * Henry, a stage name of François-Louis Henry (1786–1855), French baritone Arts and entertainment * ''Henry'' (2011 film), a Canadian short film * ''Henry'' (2015 film), a virtual reality film * '' Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer'', a 1986 American crime film * ''Henry'' (comics), an American comic strip created in 1932 by Carl Anderson * "Henry", a song by New Riders of the Purple Sage Places Antarctica * Henry Bay, Wilkes Land Australia * Henry River (New South Wales) * Henry River (Western Australia) Canada * Henry Lake (Vancouver Island), British Columbia * Henry Lake (Halifax County), Nova Scotia * Henry Lake (District of Chester), Nova Scotia New Zealand * Lake Henry (New Zealand) * Henry River (New Zealand) United States * Henry, Illinois * Henry, Indiana * Henry, Nebraska * Henry, South Dakota * Henry Count ...
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Ray Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil ( ; born February 12, 1948) is an American computer scientist, author, entrepreneur, futurist, and inventor. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), speech synthesis, text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health technology, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futures studies, futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology. Kurzweil received the 1999 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the United States' highest honor in technology, from President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony. He received the $500,000 Lemelson–MIT Prize in 2001. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 for the app ...
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Tom Oberheim
Thomas Elroy Oberheim (born July 7, 1936), known as Tom Oberheim, is an American audio engineer and electronics engineer best known for designing effects processors, analog synthesizers, sequencers, and drum machines. He has been the founder of four audio electronics companies, most notably Oberheim Electronics. He was also a key figure in the development and adoption of the MIDI standard. He is also a trained physicist. Early life and education Oberheim was born and raised in Manhattan, Kansas, also the home of Kansas State University. Beginning in junior high school, he put his interest in electronics into practice by building hi-fi components and amplifiers for friends. A fan of jazz music, Oberheim decided to move to Los Angeles after seeing an ad on the back of '' Downbeat Magazine'' about free jazz performances at a club there. He arrived in Los Angeles in July 1956 at the age of 20 with $10 in his pocket. He worked as a draftsman trainee at NCR Corporation where he w ...
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Roger Linn
Roger Curtis Linn is an American designer of electronic musical instruments and equipment. He is the designer of the LM-1, the first drum machine to use samples, and the MPC sampler, which had a major influence on the development of hip hop. Linn is also a member of the Dead Presidents Society, a group of innovators in the field of electronic music. Linn Electronics In 1979, Roger Linn and Alex Moffett founded ''Linn Moffett Electronics'' (soon to be renamed ''Linn Electronics'') to develop Linn's design for a drum machine that uses digital samples. It would be called ''LM-1'' for Linn/Moffett/1. Moffett left the company in 1982. Linn used his new drum machine and performed with Leon Russell on his album Life and Love in 1979. LM-1 In 1980, Roger Linn released the world's first drum machine to use digital samples, the LM-1 Drum Computer.
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Remo Belli
Remo Delmo Belli (June 22, 1927 – April 25, 2016) was an American jazz drummer who developed and marketed the first successful synthetic drumheads and founded the Remo company. Biography Belli was born in Mishawaka, Indiana, and began drumming at the age of 12. At age 16, he started work as a professional musician before serving in the U.S. Navy, where he also played in a band. After his discharge he moved to California, where he performed in clubs and toured with Anita O'Day and Billy May. After opening a store, Drum City, on Santa Monica Boulevard in 1950, he realized after a few years that the growth of rock and roll meant that there were insufficient supplies of calfskin, the traditional material for drumheads, to meet the demands. He bought a supply of Mylar, a durable polyester film, and after testing its qualities by stapling it to a drum hoop, established a partnership with chemist Samuel Muchnick who developed a way of bonding the plastic membrane to an aluminum hoo ...
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Remo
Remo Inc. is an American musical instruments manufacturing company based in Valencia, California, and founded by Remo Belli in 1957. Products manufactured include drum kits, drumheads, drums, and drum hardware, hardware, and various percussion instruments. History Drummer and founder Remo D. Belli experimented with PET film (biaxially oriented), PET film as a possible material for the production of drumheads after World War II due to its consistency in tonal qualities and resistance to weather changes. Throughout the 1960s, it was a fight to gain market acceptance, as purist jazzmen preferred the sound of natural calfskin. However, these calfskin drumheads had to be frequently tuned with weather fluctuations. Remo Belli created convenience for professional drummers when he pioneered the use of Mylar, a synthetic polyester film for drumheads. Originally, the drumheads were white and opaque to help mimic the look of calfskin. Later innovations were clear drumheads, two-ply dru ...
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