Hi from a music engineer, musician, game developer

At ARP, I worked with Al Pearlman, Phil Dodds (of Close Encounters and Multimedia Association fame), Michael Brigida (now at Berklee), David Friend and many other interesting people in engineering, marketing and all departments. It was really quite a place. Analog synthesizers were very competitive then. I found out later that some people there even worried that I was a spy from Moog when I interviewed. Years later I had the privilege of working a bit with Bob at Kurzweil.

I was hired as an op-amp engineer and also to help in performance and marketing on occasion. My first "starter" project was the "Little Brother", though I also worked on several Pro-Soloist revisions, the Odyssey II, and a large polyphonic keyboard instrument that never made it to market, but was later reshaped into the Quadra and Chroma (later sold by Rhodes).

One day I brought my Altair 8800 into work and talked about how microprocessors might soon play an integral role in musical instruments. (The 8800 was 8080 based and often considered the first commercially successful microcomputer.) This was early on, remember. Even floppy disks were not common yet. I wrote some polyphonic keyboard voice distribution algorithms in 8080 assembler and hooked up a system where a single keyboard controlled four different Pro-Soloists, each of which could have a different voice, like a brass choir, string quartet, etc. (The hybrid analog/digital voices of the Pro-Soloist II were pretty good, especially for the time.) So then I could basically play four-part music on the keyboard and have the high voices go to trumpets, the tenor to the trombone and the bass to a tuba. The woodwind quartet (flute/oboe/clarinet/bassoon) was especially striking. All of this was leading to some exciting polyphonic synths to compete with the then emerging Polymoog and a the Oberheim Prophet-8. People think of sounds and keyboards when they think of synths, but a lot of success and failure is often related to the human-engineering factors. Anyhow, we had a working relationship with Bose where they used our synths for testing speakers and we used their products for our testing and performance. My setup sounded spectacular (and loud) with a great Bose setup and it attracted a lot of attention. However, ARP reasoned that there were more interested guitar players than keyboard players numerically and it would be better to invest ARP's limited efforts into a guitar synthesizer rather than more keyboard products. It was a very tragic mistake (and you can find accounts of it elsewhere on the internet).

So I then worked on the Arp Avatar. At the time it was developed, it was way too early to make commercially feasible volume guitar synthesizers. Years later Roland and others would have the GR-1 and things that worked, at least somewhat, for a casual and not particularly precise player. Of course, they used technology we didn't have then to do this. We were mainly in the analog/CMOS world then. Among other people, I worked with Ron Hoag on the Avatar, designing hexaphonic pickups and even optical pickups (less magnetic crosstalk from string to string). Ron had invented the "Light Guitar" and done instruments for the Grateful Dead and others. It is a different sort of experience to play an electric guitar that can use nylon or the usual strings. It made my fingers last a lot longer, but you really had to pull a long way to bend notes.

Lots of good connections came out of my work at Arp, including some that are relevant to the music/video game I am developing. In particular, Mike Brigida of Berklee (mentioned above) has been helpful with feedback. Since this project is currently at a pre-funding stage, I am looking mainly for ground-floor sort of volunteers rather than employees at this point for the project, though sometimes those situations change very rapidly. There is an awful lot of every kind of work to do from programming to custom hardware design to sound engineering to arranging to graphic animation to business planning to music industry contacts. I've done about all of those things myself at one time or another, but this has expanded to the point where I can't seriously continue to try to grow it alone. The prototype looks pretty good and early informal play-testing results have been enthusiastic.

...Oh, and there was a question about the video games. This goes back awhile, too, since some of it was C-64 and Atari-800 cartridges and the like. (This may make me sound very old. I just turned 57, but got a really early start on music and technology as a young kid.) Computing power was more challenging in C-64 days and doing a 3-D space docking sequence was a great accomplishment. I worked on a number of titles at Spinnaker, including some educational (Kids On Keys, Grandma's House, etc.) as well as the Trillian (later renamed Tellurium) series which included Fahrenheit 451, Dragonworld and Rendezvous with Rama. We had the privilege of working directly with the science fiction authors to retarget their stories to the computer adventure world. I also did products for D.C.Heath and a special product for autistic kids called Patient Tutor that was published by Curriculum Associates, where I still have very close contacts now.

So that's part of what I'm up to now. Hope I didn't talk anyone's ears off. If people are interested, I can talk more about Kurzweil, Cakewalk and other music things at a later point.

Bruce C