Tom Oberheim at 90: “I can never retire, first of all”Four days ahead of his 90th birthday, Tom Oberheim can still remember that night in 1979. He was in bed in his hotel room at The NAMM Show in Atlanta fretting about the debut of his new synth, the Oberheim OB-X.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he tells me from his Northern California home. “In 1978 my sales were falling very fast…So I got up, went down to the hotel lobby, and wrote the owner’s manuals for the OB-X. The next day, when the show opens, me and my engineer and my sales guy were wondering, ‘Will we still have a company by the end of the day?’”
The show started at 10am. By noon, team Oberheim had landed half a million dollars in business.
47 years later, Tom is less concerned about the survival of his synthesizer business. His career, while legendary, has not been a straightforward success — he lost the rights to his own name, worked in various Silicon Valley jobs for 20 years, and only returned to making synthesizers thanks to a nudge from fellow instrument designer Roger Linn. But with several immense Oberheim instruments hitting the market in the past decade, the OB-X8, TEO-5 and the Sequential OB-6 among them, Tom is no longer losing sleep over synthesizers.
But he makes one thing clear, chuckling: “I can never retire, first of all.”

Tom celebrated his 90th birthday this week, on 7 July. A new video created by the Oberheim company, which is now part of Sequential, sees the legendary synth designer receive birthday wishes from Herbie Hancock, JJ Abrams, Roger Linn, Dave Rossum, Steve Roach, Lisa Coleman and more. As a Sequential team member warned me ahead of our interview, “Tom is always admirably humble about his contributions to the world, but in reality, he has touched so many people with his amazing instruments.”
By all accounts, they were right. Talking to me over video call while sitting at a desk that’s brimming with paperwork and a can of WD-40, Tom is supremely coy about his impact on music, synthesizers, and music production. If he’s aware how truly beloved he is, he doesn’t let on.

“I’ll tell you what’s a joy,” Tom says when I ask about his influence, recalling the countless times he’s asked what he does for a living. “I say, ‘Well, I make music synthesizers.’ And they’d say ‘Oh, I’ve heard of that, but what do they do exactly?’ I say, ‘I’ll show you’, and I take out my cell phone and play them Jump [by Van Halen].” (It’s the company’s OB-Xa that’s responsible for the song’s iconic opening riff.)
Tom beams. “I get bits and pieces of recognition, which is fun. But overall, I’ve had a wonderful life. I can’t complain.”
Starting one of the industry’s most legendary synth companies wasn’t something Tom had planned for in the 1970s. “I kind of got into the synth business out of desperation,” he admits. Born in tiny Manhattan, Kansas, he relocated to Los Angeles in 1956 to attend UCLA, where he studied physics part-time and took music classes for fun. He supported himself with a part-time job as a draftsman at the NCR Corporation, one of the early computer companies in the US, which was based 45 minutes from the UCLA campus. When his boss at NCR left the company to go design circuit boards, he asked Tom to join him.

“It was only 10 minutes from UCLA,” Tom recalls, “so I worked for them for a while, just making printed circuit boards and drawing schematics. [It was] a small company with only three engineers, and me and a woman that was building their logic boards. It was in 1957 and there were no books about computers; the industry wasn’t even 10 years old.”
After learning more about digital logic, Tom was eventually tasked with building a time-code generator. It took him a few months, but he completed the assignment and was subsequently tasked with similar projects. After graduating with a degree in physics he continued working in computing for nearly a decade, but ultimately became burned out.
“I was absolutely sick of all that,” he says. “I didn’t want to ever do it again.” Meanwhile, a less lucrative hobby of his was beginning to occupy more of his time.
Tom was living in Santa Monica in the late 60s, in a one-bedroom apartment. Here, he began making “little boxes” for his musician friends — mostly amplifiers for the likes of Don Ellis and Joseph Byrd. A friend approached him to build a ring modulator. “I didn’t even know what it was,” he says, chuckling. After reading an article in a 1961 issue of Electronics magazine, he had a better picture of the assignment and assembled a prototype. He ended up assembling a few, actually.
“A ring modulator drastically changes the [frequency] spectrum [of a signal] and makes for some very weird, very crazy sounds,” Tom explains. “That’s where people were at in 1969. Synthesizers were just barely invented, and it was a few years before the Minimoog [came to market]. Eventually, in 1969, I decided to put that into limited production just by myself — and that was the beginning of Oberheim.”
Chicago Musical Instruments (CMI) approached Tom about the ring modulator, asking him to produce it for the brand. It was sold as the Maestro RM-1A, and he estimates sales at only around 200 units. But it was his next product in this family, the Maestro PS-1 phase shifter, that let Tom take the next leap. The company sold 70,000 units of the PS-1, which gave him the money to take on new projects.
But synthesizers weren’t top of his mind until he attended the 1971 NAMM Show in Chicago and saw a now-legendary modular synthesizer first-hand: the ARP 2600.
Tom loved the 2600 — he told me in 2024 that he stayed up for “36 hours straight” playing it when he got his hands on one. So enthralled, he asked ARP if he could be their Los Angeles dealer. He then sold the 2600 to artists such as Lalo Schifrin, Frank Zappa, and Leon Russell.
In the studios of these musicians, he happened across early Moog and ARP sequencers, which sparked an idea: “a digital sequencer where you could load the notes from the synthesiser keyboard,” says Tom. “So I developed that product. It was called the DS-2. But it had a problem that I didn’t think about.”
The DS-2 could only send pre-programmed sequences to a synth, meaning the performer couldn’t play new notes simultaneously — you’d need two synthesizers to make this work. Tom decided to create a small “absolute minimum analogue synthesizer module”, which became the Synthesizer Expander Module (SEM), to load ideas from the DS-2 and play along on the synth at the same time.
Little did Tom know, the SEM would be the catalyst for his soon-to-be synthesizer company. In January 1975, CMI (which had been acquired by Norlin) cancelled its orders of the Maestro pedals Tom was making. With a handful of employees to retain, he had to pivot his business, fast. He says that “almost overnight”, he had the idea to link multiple SEM modules, connect an E-Mu digital scanning keyboard, and create a synthesizer: the Oberheim Two Voice and the Oberheim Four Voice were exhibited at the NAMM Show in Chicago in June 1975.
The SEM, the Two Voice and the Four Voice were the earliest examples of the signature Oberheim sound, which is rich, fat and wide. (To understand what it sounds like, listen to Rush’s 1982 prog rock opus Subdivisions, and Eurythmics’ 1983 moody synth-pop hit Sweet Dreams.)
“I decided to put in a two-pole filter that [ARP’s Dennis Colin] designed for me — Jim [Cooper, of UCLA] designed the envelope generators and Dave [Rossum] designed the oscillators — I designed the front panel, the power supply and all the metal work. Everybody did a great job, but I wasn’t real happy with the sound.” He took his soldering iron and resistors and tinkered with the signal levels of the oscillators, the filter, and the voltage-controlled amplifier until he found something he liked.
Once he found the sound, the Oberheim team never changed it. “I’m proud to say I had something to do with it,” says Tom.

Despite a turbulent 1978, where sales dropped after Dave Smith’s Sequential Circuits released the Prophet-5, Oberheim had an inspiring seven-year run. It released a string of studio icons, including the DMX drum machine, the OB-X (which “saved the company”, says Tom), the OB-Xa, and the OB-8.
Oberheim was making history, but Tom doesn’t think of it that way at all. “All we were doing was trying to stay ahead of the mad rush…Roland, Korg, Yamaha, there was a lot of competition. We were on a continual crash programme for several years.”
The money that Oberheim Electronics made from this run set up Tom nicely. He married his wife, Jill, and they moved into a small house in Santa Monica, which he then remodelled. (During our talk, an immensely friendly Jill appears on camera to say hello and crack a few good jokes about various British and American politicians.)
Although he was building synthesizers that were defining the sound of 80s music, Tom still doesn’t consider himself a musician, nor does he keep many of his own instruments at home. An OB-Xa, which Prince used for his album 1999, will set you back around $10,000 today — Tom doesn’t own one, but a framed picture of one hangs on the wall beside him, like a proud parent putting up a photo of their child.

“I don’t have room for stuff, and I’m not a collector. I’ve got a couple of SEMs and I’ve got an OB-8, which actually is not here — I’ve loaned it to a friend now for two years,” he says with a laugh.
Oberheim Electronics flourished until 1985, when the production of the Matrix 12 synthesizer was delayed, and the company was forced into bankruptcy. Tom’s lawyer acquired the Oberheim name (although Tom eventually sued this lawyer for legal malpractice), and released the Matrix series. The Oberheim brand under the lawyer hit bankruptcy again in 1988, and guitar behemoth Gibson then purchased the rights to Oberheim’s brand. Roger Linn and Dave Smith’s companies also went out of business around the mid-80s.
Tom tried keeping a foot in the synthesizer business, and in 1990 came up with another idea for an instrument called the SEM Max, but couldn’t make it work. “I was just by myself, and didn’t have a lot of money,” he recalls. “This synthesiser was way too big for me to handle on my own. And so I decided in the mid-90s that it was time for me to go to work and pay the mortgage on the house. I just got a job off the internet, and then for the next five or six years I worked three different jobs in Silicon Valley, none having to do with music.”
These jobs included building microcontroller software for traffic light systems, high-level tech writing, and working at a think tank owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. From the mid-90s to the late 00s, Tom’s focus wasn’t on building a new, revolutionary instrument or influencing culture, but simply on getting by with his wife and family, paying off his mortgage and building his savings.
Paul Epworth’s Oberheim OB-X. Image: MusicTech
“We thought that, ‘Well, if we’re careful, when we get older, we’ll probably be able to pay for the nursing home,’” he says. Tom and Jill still live in the same Bay Area house they bought 35 years ago after leaving Los Angeles.
He describes his work in Silicon Valley as a “high tech rat race”, and has fonder memories of his time in the synth world. I suggest that he was part of a ‘synthesis brat pack’, with his contemporaries Dave Smith, Dave Rossum, Bob Moog, Don Buchla, Roger Linn and Alan R Pearlman all creating innovative, competing products in the same era. It’s this gang that is also responsible for the development of the MIDI protocol — but Tom humbly plays down his role.
“The history books say that I was involved in [creating] MIDI, and that’s such a joke,” he says. “When Dave [Smith] did his first paper about tying synthesizers together, it was a digital thing and I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. I said, ‘Don’t talk to me about a digital interface hooking up machines. I don’t want to do that.’”
However, when Dave and Roland began implementing MIDI into their instruments, and convinced other manufacturers to follow suit, they asked Tom to become the first president of the MIDI Manufacturers Association. As a neutral party between Roland and Sequential, he ultimately said yes.
It’s thanks to the synth brat pack that Tom ever got back into the synth business at all. After Dave started Dave Smith Instruments in 2002 and revived the Sequential brand, in 2009, Roger convinced Tom to produce a reissue of the SEM module created in the 70s.
“I sold a couple thousand all by myself, and then I had the idea for the upgrade to the Oberheim Two Voice — that’s my baby, the newer Two Voice,” he says. “That got me back into it a little bit. But I didn’t want to have a company again, because I’d proven that I didn’t have the chops to be a good company president.”
With the help of his good friend and previous employee Marcus Ryle, he soon reclaimed the rights to the Oberheim name. Uli Behringer had acquired the rights from Gibson, and Ryle convinced Behringer to return the name to Tom. Marcus later worked with Tom to get Focusrite to buy his name and trademark, with Sequential as the distributor for Oberheim products — a setup that continues today. Oberheim and Sequential now ship the TEO-5, OB-X8 and OB-6.
Tom Oberheim. Image: Sequential
At 90, Tom remains sharp and curious. He asks me about my role at MusicTech, what my hometown in England is like, even asking me for photos of the town square and surrounding nature. He recently spent a year reading about quantum mechanics — “I still don’t understand it,” he says. And, while technically retired, he also remains an advisor to the Sequential and Oberheim brand, working on instruments such as the TEO-5, and organises his local church’s organ concert a few times a year.
“I do also have a little project, which I can’t talk about but it’s keeping me busy,” he teases.
Modest as he is during our two-hour video call, Tom refrains from congratulating himself on his contribution to music, but his impact is undeniable. Musicians who are credited with changing the trajectory of pop music in the 80s did so using Oberheim’s instruments — Prince, Van Halen, Rush, Stevie Nicks, The Police, Kool & The Gang and countless others. Today, producers like Paul Epworth, Jack Antonoff and Stranger Things’ Michael Stein and Kyle Dixon are shaping the modern music landscape, still using Oberheim’s tools.
While he says he’s slowing down — “it takes me a day to do the things I used to do in an hour” — with new instruments still coming from Oberheim, Tom’s influence persists. All of it, he says, is simply what happens when you “do the work you love, and combine that with what you like to do that isn’t work.” 70 years into his career, this country boy from Kansas is still finding time to tweak filters and oscillators: “I love being in the lab tinkering with something.”
 
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