Ever notice that your performance rig has grown so large and complex that your setup time has increased dramatically? Don’t expect much sympathy from Don Lewis. During the early ’70s, this brilliant pop/Gospel-singing organist/synthesist was touring with a Hammond organ, a Leslie speaker, a Wurlitzer electric piano, numerous analog synthesizers, and other peripherals — all of which allowed him to perform his inspiring one-man shows…
Read MoreIt was 1974, and Don Lewis was getting tired of hauling around so many keyboards. One day he would be in a studio in Los Angeles, working alongside Quincy Jones. A week later, he might be on tour as a member of the Beach Boys’ backup band. Or he might be performing his own gigs, shuffling up and down the West Coast with an ever-growing assortment of keyboards and other equipment.
Read MoreEarlier this month, visionary, joyful musician Don Lewis passed away. Lewis was an electronic music pioneer and the creator of the Live Electronic Orchestra, an innovation that helped shape current synthesizer technology. He worked in the studio with Quincy Jones, Sergio Mendez, Michael Jackson…
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Percussion is the back beat, down beat, foundation for and expression of temperament in music. The evolution of Roland’s TR808 has been all that and more- its versatility inspiring new uses for the instrument, as well as a new genre of music.
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It is one thing to be called a pioneer, yet quite another to actually be one. For Don Lewis, his decades-long contributions to the development of the synthesizer and related technologies like the vocoder qualify him as the real deal.
Read MoreIt would be easy to entitle this opening blog entry, “The Man Behind the Movie,” but Ned Augustenborg is much more.
His unwavering motivation to keep the dream of bringing the film to the big screen over the past decade- despite personal and professional delays – could cause a lesser-driven director to permanently shelve it.
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