User Guide / Owners Manual

ARTURIA – Matrix-12 V – USER MANUAL 11
The Oberheim DMX and DX drum machines
So the Linn LM-1 may have arrived first, but the features, the Prommer and the price
point quickly established Oberheim drum machines as a significant presence in the
music industry.
1.1.3.5 MIDI
Yep. MIDI. Tom Oberheim helped drive the development of the Musical Instrument
Digital Interface protocol, a.k.a. MIDI, in three ways.
First, he brought the concept to life by implementing a digital communication bus
for his own products (the Parallel Buss). This enabled devices such as the OB-8, the
DMX and the DSX to become a synchronized, musically useful sequencing system.
The home project studio was born!
Second, when two other manufacturers took notice of Oberheim’s system,
discussions began regarding a universal protocol that could be adopted by all
manufacturers.
Third, and possibly most importantly, those three companies pitched this new idea
to other major instrument manufacturers and convinced them it was a
commercially viable concept. The course of the music world was forever changed
through the efforts of Tom Oberheim and his colleagues.
1.2 The Oberheim synth family: a genealogy
Few product lines are as diverse as this one, even when only considering the
synthesizers. From a small, single-voice expansion module to the behemoth Matrix
12, within the space of ten years this company covered a lot of ground.
But it all started with an innovative little box called the SEM.
1.2.1 SEM: the little synth that could
While selling ARP synthesizers, Oberheim began to design a device to help solve a
small problem created by his DS-2a sequencer: the performer had to surrender
control of the synthesizer to the sequencer while it was doing its thing. Few could