Re: Uli Behringer of The Music Group Q&A
Dear Phil,
I’d love to answer this question even at the risk of boring some readers because it reminds me of the very early days when I first got started.
Much of my knowledge comes from my father, who was a Nuclear Physicist. He worked at a Swiss research facility that operated a heavy-water reactor. His attention to detail and scientific thought process impressed me as a boy and I still remember today how he explained why it is important to pay attention to details even if you can’t see them later.
I learned a lot about determination and proper planning from watching my father build a full-fledged pipe organ in our house with over 1000 pipes! In addition to having a scientific mind he was also a passionate musician who regularly played the organ in our church. For him it was only natural to combine his love of music with his passion for imagining and building things that most people wouldn’t even dream of.
So, he salvaged an old broken organ from a dismantled church, then set about completely rebuilding and converting it to electronic control. In the process he ended out constructing the world’s first electronically controlled pipe organ. Only recently did I find out, that he earned a patent (Espacenet - Bibliographic data) for one of his inventions.
It was 1967, semiconductors had just become popular and I remember how my father would meticulously select Germanium transistors on our dining table.
My father had a full-blown workshop and often I would look over his shoulder, absorbing the care with which he built things. Every once in a while I would help him on his projects and thereby learned to have the same sensitivity to precision and pride in the result. Soon I started building my own projects and by the time I was 16 I had built my own synthesizer, complete with metal parts that I milled at the machine shop next door and rub-on “Letraset” labels on all the controls.
My first commercial product? By the 1970s, when I was around 12, I was ready to take on my first commercial product and it wasn’t in sound but rather in lighting. I had discovered the power of Triac and Diac semiconductors and was building them into “lightorgans” which triggered light bulbs to the rhythm of the music.
Very popular at the time, I sold so many around my neighborhood that I soon had enough money to buy a motorbike and get into all kinds of other trouble.
