Thursday, September 10, 2009

Oberheim 1976 family of products, Contemporary Keyboard 1976


Oberheim advertisement of its family of products including Oberheim Eight Voice, Four Voice, Two Voice and Expander Module synthesizers, and Mini-Sequencer and 144 Note Digital Sequencer from page 9 of Contemporary Keyboard magazine August 1976.

Oh, hello. Did I just walk in on an Oberheim family photo shoot? I think I'm dreaming.

This Oberheim advertisement is fabulous for a number of reasons.
  1. It contains photos of numerous Oberheim gear from 1976.
  2. It has historical value because it tells us when Oberheim started shipping gear - November 1975.
  3. It name drops more famous musicians than your average ARP ad (although a future ARP blog post will show that Alan R. Pearlman is still the king...)
  4. Did I mention all the gear?
Oberheim did another family photo a decade later - I still like to flip back and forth between the two ads to see just how far things have come in ten years. And I think it even beats Roland's family photo ad from 1978.

While doing some research for this post, I Googled 'oberheim history' and came across this 2008 Tom Oberheim interview on Synthopia that is over two and a half hours long. I'm afraid I never got any further in my research. :o)

2 comments:

synthfiend said...

There is a transcript available for those of you who may want to read the interview. It is here:
http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/video-archive/transcript/tom_oberheim_polyphonic_one_love/transcript

synthfiend said...

Interesting that this ad says they began shipping in 1975, while one of the previous ads you posted listed the SEM as having started shipping in December, 1974.

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