Richard Grayson

Mentioned on the "Products" page of Tom Oberheim's official website. It was used for Rain, as specified on Grayson's curriculum vitae and as described in Synapse, Vol. 1, No. 3 (September-October 1976).

Synapse, Vol. 1, No. 3, "An Interview With Tom Oberheim founder of Oberheim Electronics with Cynthia Brett Webster"

Synapse: "What was your instrument?"

Oberheim: "I was a choir singer. I didn't play an instrument at that time. I did do some performances for a while though. When I built the first ring modulator, I showed it to a very close friend of mine, Richard Grayson. He's a composer, performer, and in incredible keyboard improvisationalist. He came over to my house one afternoon, I hooked the ring modulator up to the piano and he played a couple notes and a couple chords and then he just started playing this new instrument immediately. I had a pedal hooked up to the carrier frequency so that the ring modulator could be varied. On preceding evenings, I hooked up my Revox tape recorder to get some tape delay and tape echo effects. That added to the whole thing and Richard was composing on the spot while I'd fiddle with the echo and other stuff."

"At that time, Richard was starting to put on these noon concerts. Finally on one of these concerts, we did a little electronic piece together. We had a couple speakers, I hooked the ring modulator up to the piano, had a little tape delay and people loved it. We actually had pieces where there was a lot going on by the both of us, I wasn’t just bringing up the gain. Richard would play a chord and I'd add echo or some kind of reverb. He would react to that and then I'd react back; we really had fun. That went on for three years. Richard continued with them, and he has just given his seventh annual concert, so we started this seven years ago. I considered myself a performer because of what Richard and I did. I’m certainly not a composer, and I’m not actively a performer anymore, I just build equipment now.”

"Richard Grayson's Curriculum Vitae, January, 2004"

Rain (piano, ring modulator, tape delay)

Tom Oberheim website

The first commercial product that Tom produced was the Music Modulator which was the result of combining Tom's experiments with ring modulators with other circuitry to create a device that could be used in live performance. This product was used by a number of contemporary musicians including innovative trumpeter Don Ellis, and experimental composer Richard Grayson, who played the units with Tom in improvised live performance concerts.