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Thomas Elroy Oberheim (born July 7, 1936), known as Tom Oberheim, is an American audio engineer and electronics engineer best known for designing Effects unit, analog synthesizers, Music sequencer, and . 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.
Oberheim was attending a class during his last semester at UCLA when he met and became friends with trumpet player Don Ellis, and keyboardist Joseph Byrd of the band The United States of America, who were attending the same class. Oberheim stayed in touch with both Ellis and Byrd after leaving UCLA, and ended up building an amplifier for Ellis to use for his public address system. Oberheim also built guitar amplifiers for The United States of America, and their lead singer Dorothy Moskowitz asked him to build a Ring modulation for the band (Joseph Byrd had used one while a band member, and Moskowitz wanted one for the band's new keyboardist, Richard Grayson). While ring modulator circuit information was readily available, it was a 1961 article by Harald Bode in Electronics Magazine that gave Oberheim the information he needed to design and hand-build one for musical application. Oberheim also built a ring modulator for Don Ellis. After hearing about Oberheim's device, film composer Leonard Rosenman contacted him for a ring modulator to use in the production of the Beneath the Planet of the Apes film soundtrack. Oberheim, who had grown tired of designing computer equipment, found far greater personal satisfaction in designing equipment used by artists to create music and the positive feedback he received from musicians like Herbie Hancock and Jan Hammer.
Oberheim further expanded on the performance capabilities of 2-note polyphony in 1973, using his computer engineering experience to design the DS-2, one of the first digital-electronics-based music Music sequencer. The sequencer would completely control (i.e., "play from memory") the synthesizer; however, leaving the musician with no way to play along live on the instrument's keyboard, this also identified a problem that inspired Oberheim to design the Oberheim SEM with the design assistance of Dave Rossum (later of E-MU Systems fame), that facilitated simultaneously recorded + live playing (akin to the multi-track audio recording practice of "overdubbing"). Oberheim introduced the SEM, the first synthesizer bearing his company's name, at the Audio Engineering Society convention in Los Angeles in May 1974.
The following year, when Norlin (CMI's successor) cancelled several large orders for Oberheim's Maestro products, Oberheim shifted his design and manufacturing efforts to replace that lost business. He expanded the SEM concept, and again enlisting the expertise of Dave Rossum and Scott Wedge of E-mu Systems, combining the SEM with a digital keyboard, created the Oberheim 2-Voice and 4-Voice synthesizers, the first commercially available polyphonic music synthesizers. By combining more single-voice synthesizer modules together, Oberheim expanded the concept to the Oberheim 8-Voice synthesizer, introduced in 1976. Realizing that programming the 4-Voice on stage was impractical, he designed the Polyphonic Synthesizer Programmer, an integrated circuit memory for storing the synthesizer's sound settings, another industry first. Integrating this technology into a synthesizer, Oberheim introduced the OB1, the first programmable monophonic synthesizer, in 1977.
By 1980, Oberheim's products, by then including synthesizers, a polyphonic digital sequencer (the Oberheim DSX), and a sampled-sound drum machine (the Oberheim DMX) were designed to be combined to form a complete system, and could be interconnected by a proprietary Oberheim parallel bus interface that pre-dated MIDI.
With the company now gathering pace, from the turn of the 1980s Oberheim now streamlined his polyphonic synthesizers into a series of major integrated keyboard instruments which proved highly popular, coming to define many records of the era, to a similar extent to Sequential's Prophet 5. The Oberheim company first produced the Oberheim OB-X in 1979, the Oberheim OB-Xa in 1980-81, and the OB-8 in 1983, as well as the Matrix-12 and Matrix-6 from the mid-1980s.
In 1987, Oberheim formed Marion Systems (named after his daughter Emily Marion) in Santa Monica and later Lafayette in California. During this time, Oberheim performed consulting work for Roland and Akai, and produced a 12-bit to 16-bit option for Akai's S900 sampler. Oberheim also developed the Marion Systems MSR-2, a modular synthesizer concept.
In the year 2000 after Marion Systems, Oberheim founded SeaSound, a manufacturer of audio interfaces. Oberheim also served as an advisor to Muse Research.
In 2015, Oberheim announced the Two-Voice Pro, an upgraded and improved version of the instrument he described as his favorite of Oberheim's early years.
At the January 2016 NAMM Show, Oberheim announced the Dave Smith Instruments OB-6, a collaboration with Dave Smith which resulted in Oberheim's first voltage-controlled multi-voiced polyphonic synthesizer since the mid-1980s; Oberheim designed the VCO and VCF sections in the style of the company's SEM, while control features, arpeggiator/step sequencer and effects processing were designed by Smith based on the Prophet platform.
In 2019, Gibson announced the Oberheim Electronics name and other intellectual properties had been returned to Tom Oberheim. In 2021, Oberheim announced a manufacturing run of a limited quantity of Special Edition TVS Pro which would resemble the original TVS Pro, but would be the first Oberheim product to wear the "Oberheim®" brand since 1985. A limited number of buyers were chosen from a lottery, and the cost was announced as $4,995, plus tax and shipping.
In 2022, it was announced that Oberheim Electronics was re-opening and would be soon shipping a new Oberheim-branded synthesizer, called the Oberheim OB-X8, in May. The instrument was also co-developed with Sequential's Dave Smith, and was one of the last instruments to have that distinction before his death in 2022. In 2024, the TEO-5, an Oberheim-branded version of Sequential's Take 5 synthesizer with Oberheim filters, was also released. The instrument took its name from Oberheim's initials.
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