Herbie Hancock

Synth-Bank®'s President Bryan Bell designed and hand-built the required computer processors by hand for Herbie Hancock's "Ultimate Composing Machine."

Herbie Hancock had a big problem that was getting bigger all the time. He had a jazz career, a pop career, a film soundtrack career, and a tremendous amount of intellectuall property and intellectual works-in-progress to keep organized.

The system Bell developed for Hancock not only to helped him manage his existing intellectual property more effectively, it greatly increased his productivity by helping him better organize his ideas during the creative process.

• To create an integrated system for writing, storing, and managing music compositions, sound effects, and equipment configurations

• To create a system that would enable an artist to use their time more effectively

• To enable the entire studio to operate as a single instrument

The "ultimate" system prototype used an Apple II personal computer to provide a user interface enabling the manipulation of the instruments connected to Bell's own hard-wired synthesizer network.

"We couldn't get a fast enough computer that was commercially-available," he recalls. "So we used an Apple II as a control terminal, and we actually bought raw processor chips and made our own 16 bit computers."

To get the system functional, Bell not only had to build his own computer processors, he had to write his own operating system, disk drivers, and even his own fonts. The end result, however, was well worth the effort: an unprecedented integrated studio system that combined every known brand of synthesizer in the world.

Some of the key system integration technologies that Bell invented for Herbie's Ultimate Composing Machine would continue to evolve and be refined by Bell and others until they eventually became the MIDI interface standard.

Bryan still feels that some of the prototype's integrated features remain unmatched to this day, and considers Herbie's "ultimate composing machine" to be one of his greatest systems integration achievements.