Remembering Don Lewis and LEO

Thanks to the groundbreaking innovation of MIDI (more on that on the next page!), connecting two electronic instruments together has been a relatively easy affair since 1983. Before 1983, well, that’s another story. Suppose you wanted to play a note on a synthesizer and have the same note play simultaneously on another synthesizer, perhaps to combine two sounds. Pre-1983, your best bet was to use a control voltage (CV). With CV, one device outputs a specific voltage representing something that it’s doing, such as the note it’s playing, and other device receives that voltage and does something with it, like play a note. But there were multiple “standards” for turning notes into voltages, making it hard to combine devices from different manufacturers. Now imagine you wanted to do this with lots of notes and lots of sounds, even changing sounds, all in a live setting. This would have been, in a word, difficult, but it’s precisely what Don Lewis did with the Live Electronic Orchestra.

Don grew up with big musical dreams, wanting to play his church’s organ and to conduct an orchestra. He also had a passion for electrical engineering, studying at Tuskegee Institute before becoming a nuclear weapons specialist with the Air Force and later working for Honeywell in Denver. He remained involved in music, running a church music program, working part-time in a music store, and playing in local nightclubs. He soon became a demonstrator for Hammond organs, performing at conventions and trade shows—often with rhythm units to add a percussive element to his playing. Don couldn’t find quite the right settings on his rhythm unit, an Ace Tone FR-2L Rhythm Ace, so he opened it up and modified it until it sounded the way he wanted. It wasn’t long before Don applied this logic—modify something until it makes the music you’re driven to make—to the rest of his instruments. In 1974, Don began planning the Live Electronic Orchestra (LEO, for short), a collection of electronic instruments—heavily modified, of course—that he would perform with in real time.

Over the next three years, Don and engineer Richard Bates overcame immense technical challenges, and by 1977, LEO was built and active. LEO’s list of components is dizzying: a Hammond Concorde console including two manuals and pedalboard, a Pascetta four-voice polyphonic keyboard, an aftertouch sensor from an

ARP Pro Soloist, four Oberheim Synthesizer Expander Modules, two ARP 2600 synthesizers, Roland ProMars and Jupiter 4 synthesizers, a Roland TR-808 drum machine (a later addition), a Roland VP-330 vocoder into which Don sang, Roland Space Echo and Digital Chorus effects units, the controller for a Roland Revo rotating speaker, a Hammond volume pedal controlling eight channels of audio, a mixer, numerous custom controls for modifying settings on the fly, all built into custom plexiglass enclosures and the pedestal from a Hammond X-66 organ. That Don and Richard were able to put all of this together into a functional system before MIDI is incredible; that Don was able to play it all live is simply awe-inspiring.

LEO has been on display at the Museum of Making Music since 2001 with two short trips away: in 2013 so Don could perform with it at the NAMM Show and again in 2020 for repairs while we renovated. Before our public reopening in 2021, Don and his wife Julie spent two days in Carlsbad to ensure LEO could still make music. We planned for Don to be able to drop in and perform when he was in the area again. Sadly, Don passed away on November 6, 2022 at the age of 81. We are honored to share Don’s legacy with our visitors and to display LEO, a clear expression of personal passion and sheer will, overcoming tremendous obstacles to realize a dream.

2023 marks the 40th anniversary of MIDI’s introduction, and we’re celebrating with a new special exhibition exploring the human side of this influential technology: how MIDI has aided musicians in becoming composers, how it’s helped engineers create incredible theatrical productions, enabled people with disabilities to make music, and much more.

Special Exhibition Opens April 7, 2023

The work of Don Lewis and Richard Bates in the creation of the Live Electronic Orchestra was seen firsthand by Ikutaro Kakehashi, founder of Roland Corporation. Kakehashi was coming to understand that synthesizer manufacturers would need to agree on a standard interconnect if they wanted to grow their market. Along with Dave Smith, founder of Sequential Circuits, he led the charge to develop what became known as the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or MIDI. The impact of MIDI is hard to overstate: electronic musical instruments and other devices, including sequencers, recorders, and more, could send accurate and predictable information to each other in real time. Since MIDI’s introduction in 1983, it has been implemented in over 2.5 billion instruments and devices and, most importantly, has enabled innumerable musicians to do things that otherwise may have been impossible.

With our latest special exhibition, MIDI@40: Artistry, Inclusivity, Connectivity, we’ll be exploring the human side of this influential technology: how MIDI has aided musicians in becoming composers, how it’s helped engineers to create incredible theatrical productions, how it’s enabled people with disabilities to make music, and much more. The exhibition will present a timeline of MIDI’s development and will also look forward to the future of MIDI, with a focus on the emerging technologies of MIDI 2.0. Museum visitors will get first-hand experience of the kinds of creative connectivity enabled by MIDI in a unique interactive experience.