Don Ellis

Tom Oberheim made Ellis an early prototype in the late 1960s, as recalled in this excerpt from a 1977 High Fidelity interview.

"So I built one, and this friend hooked it up to a piano and made some weird sounds with it; he thought it was terrific. Around the same time, I was building amplifiers and other little things for Don Ellis, the jazz musician, and he decided he wanted a ring modulator, too. Well, the word got around fast. In 1969, Leonard Rosenman, a film composer, heard about it and decided to use one in the score of Beneath the Planet of the Apes. He called me and I traipsed over to 20th Century-Fox for the recording. The funny thing was that some of the guys in that big orchestra listened to what was happening and said, 'Hey, I want a ring modulator, too.' So because of all these little unrelated incidents, I decided that maybe there was a market for these units.