of Microprocessors

invited to try it for an afternoon and did some amazing stuff.
The next step of course is arranging for productization, manufacturing, and
marketing. After "scouring the world", Key Concepts quickly concluded that the
Notebender was just a bit too radical for immediate market acceptance and
besides, the Chroma seemed to be the only instrument that could use its signals.
Then there was the problem of raising capital to pay for detailed design, tooling,
beta prototypes, and so forth.
So the sliding keys were backburnered in favor of adapting the unique pressure
sensor I'd developed to a traditional wood keyboard that was already tooled and
readily available from Pratt-Read. Instead of the Apple-II synth interface, which
nobody else had adopted, we tried out the new "Musical Instrument Digital
Interface" (MIDI), which, if nothing else, was simple to implement. While it
didn't have a Poly Pitchbend command, its Poly Pressure command seemed OK
for the task at hand.
The result after a few more months was two "MIDIBoard" prototypes, which Key
Concepts again shopped around to major synth manufacturers at the time (New
England Digital, Fairlight, [what a pain it was sending their unit to Australia], and
Kurzweil). All were interested this time but Kurzweil was right in town and was
willing to sign a development contract with follow-on royalties. I soon found
myself locked in a room at Kurzweil working frantically on the software to get a
couple of units ready for the 1985 NAMM show.
Concurrent with all this I had separated from MTU and after about a year of
"consulting" decided to apply for a position at Kurzweil. Following a "grueling"
interview, which consisted mostly of lunch with the top engineers, I was accepted
and soon moved to Waltham. Besides MIDIBoard manufacturing support, my
first assignment was to write a sound editor, on an Apple-II computer, for the just
released K150 additive synth.
SONIK : Can you tell us about the "cheesy" advert you appeared in the mid 80's
that had the caption like: "our product is so great because it was designed by Hal
Chamberlin"?
HAL : Well, they say that 80% of advertising is getting people to remember the
ad. So if you've remembered it for 16 years, I guess it was successful in that
respect. On the other hand, you don't seem to remember the company or the
product.
The ad in question was actually run by MTU, whom I mentioned previously as
my former company before joining Kurzweil, after I had left. The product was
DigiSound-16, one of the very first if not the first standard product audio A-to-D
and D-to-A converters for use with mini- and personal computers.
Back in 1985 a major part of any serious software synthesis project was the