Oberheim polyphonic
Encyclopedia
The Oberheim
Oberheim
Oberheim Electronics is an American company, founded in 1969 by Tom Oberheim , which manufactured audio synthesizers and a variety of other electronic musical instruments.-Oberheim Electronics:...

 polyphonic is an analog music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

 synthesizer
Synthesizer
A synthesizer is an electronic instrument capable of producing sounds by generating electrical signals of different frequencies. These electrical signals are played through a loudspeaker or set of headphones...

 that was produced from 1974 to 1979 by Oberheim
Oberheim
Oberheim Electronics is an American company, founded in 1969 by Tom Oberheim , which manufactured audio synthesizers and a variety of other electronic musical instruments.-Oberheim Electronics:...

 electronics
Electronics
Electronics is the branch of science, engineering and technology that deals with electrical circuits involving active electrical components such as vacuum tubes, transistors, diodes and integrated circuits, and associated passive interconnection technologies...

. Tom Oberheim, the founder, knew that musicians needed a way to play chords
Chord (music)
A chord in music is any harmonic set of two–three or more notes that is heard as if sounding simultaneously. These need not actually be played together: arpeggios and broken chords may for many practical and theoretical purposes be understood as chords...

 on the synthesizers that were becoming popular in all styles of music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

 in the 1970s. Except for huge, custom, modular synths, all synthesizers in the mid-70s could only be played one note
Note
In music, the term note has two primary meanings:#A sign used in musical notation to represent the relative duration and pitch of a sound;#A pitched sound itself....

 at a time. Chords were impossible to play.
Oberheim
Oberheim
Oberheim Electronics is an American company, founded in 1969 by Tom Oberheim , which manufactured audio synthesizers and a variety of other electronic musical instruments.-Oberheim Electronics:...

 took the idea and electronics of a Minimoog
Minimoog
The Minimoog is a monophonic analog synthesizer, invented by Bill Hemsath and Robert Moog. It was released in 1970 by R.A. Moog Inc. , and production was stopped in 1981. It was re-designed by Robert Moog in 2002 and released as Minimoog Voyager.The Minimoog was designed in response to the use of...

 synthesizer and put them in a small box, making a few changes, and produced his SEM (synthesizer expanding module), the building block of his polyphonic synths. By strapping two, four, or eight of these SEMs together under keyboard control, he was able to create practical, albeit large, synthesizers that could play two, four, or eight notes simultaneously. Thus the Oberheim polyphonic was born. Each SEM in an Oberheim polyphonic defines one voice (or note) being played in a chord. In addition to multiple voices, on an Oberheim polyphonic you could save settings for sounds you created with a preset programmer (four and eight voice models) and you could glide from one note or chord to another using portamento
Portamento
Portamento is a musical term originated from the Italian expression "portamento della voce" , denoting from the beginning of the 17th century a vocal slide between two pitches and its emulation by members of the violin family and certain wind instruments, and is sometimes used...

. The Oberheim polyphonic was later outdated by a new line of Oberheim synthesizers and Sequential Circuits
Sequential Circuits
Sequential Circuits Inc. was a California-based synthesizer company that was founded in the early 1970s by Dave Smith and sold to Yamaha Corporation in 1987. The company, throughout its lifespan, pioneered many groundbreaking technologies and design principles that are often taken for granted in...

 synths that used integrated circuits; these were less heavy and much smaller than the Oberheim polyphonic.
exhibited at Berlin Musical Instrument Museum
Berlin Musical Instrument Museum
The Berlin Musical Instrument Museum is located at the Kulturforum on Tiergartenstraße. The museum contains a collection of over 3,500 musical instruments from the 16th century onward and is one of the largest and most representative musical instrument collections in Germany.The museum was...


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