World’s First Digital Guitar FX Device
The first Harmonizer, the H910, released in 1976, was designed to sit in a rack in the studio. Within a couple of years, major acts with big budgets like Led Zeppelin, The Mothers of Invention, and Van Halen began to tour with them. Costing nearly $10,000 in today’s dollars, the H910 was far beyond the reach of, well, nearly everyone else. This was the era of primitive logic chips, and it took a small boatload of them to simply delay audio as 1s and 0s by a fraction of a second. In 1978, our founder, Richard Factor, took on the challenge of designing an ‘affordable’ Harmonizer; one that a guitar or keyboard player might take on the road.
The HM80 featured guitar in, amp out, as well as performance features including expression pedal control of pitch and an auxiliary switch jack for switching the repeat function on/off. While it wasn’t a ‘stompbox’—the boatload of early power-hungry chips required more juice than a wall wart could supply, which gave us pause about putting AC at the feet of a guitarist—it predated the introduction of the first digital delay stompbox, the Boss DD-2, by nearly five years.
At about half the price of an H910, HM80s found their way into the hands of a few gigging musicians and composers who, for the first time, could exploit the new world of digital audio effects live. To our delight and surprise, we found out the device also made its way into the hands of students and educators through universities who couldn't afford the H910.
We asked Richard Factor to dig deep in his memory and tell us how the first digital audio device designed for live use came to be. Here’s the full story: https://www.eventideaudio.com/blog/aagn ... harmonizer
