“The SEM is nothing but a copy of the Odyssey or a copy of the Minimoog, or a little mixture. But I loved it, and so I wanted to do it”: Tom Oberheim on designing synthsAccording to Tom Oberheim, good design isn’t just about catering to what a musician thinks they want, but about offering something that opens their eyes to new possibilities.
The legendary inventor and engineer recently sat down with Attack Magazine to discuss the creative process behind some of his most iconic synths and the design philosophies that fuel much of his work.

READ MORE: Tom Oberheim stayed up “36 hours straight” to play the first synthesizer he ever bought 

“You can’t simply design what the musician wants, because he or she may not know all the possibilities,” Oberheim says of his approach to synths-making. “And on the other hand, you can’t spend all your time only worrying about the oscillator drift and the power supply and all that. You have to do this grey-area thing.”
Looking back on the development of the Oberheim SEM (short for “synthesizer expansion module”) – one of the world’s first self-contained synth modules, he says, “Of course, I didn’t invent the synthesizer.”
“The SEM is nothing but a copy of the Odyssey or a copy of the Minimoog, or a little mixture,” he adds. “But I loved it, and so I wanted to do it. I think, of course, the polyphonic thing was interesting, but it was just a very short prelude to where everything was polyphonic.”
Oberheim also notes that while the SEM may have been an iteration of earlier designs, his personal touch was in making it accessible – both in terms of usability and cost.
“I think that we were driven more than anything by, number one, reliability,” says the engineer. “The fortunate thing was, for me, when I designed the SEM, I designed the front panel. I did the power supply. The VCOs were designed by Dave Rossum (of E-mu). The filter was designed by the guy that designed the ARP 2600, Dennis Colin. And Jim Cooper did the envelope generators. My contribution to the SEM was that it’s the cheapest, simplest synthesizer that’s still usable.”
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