The entire Topspin team would like to extend sincere congratulations and general awe as our Chairman and Co-Founder Peter Gotcher accepted an Emmy, The Philo T. Farnsworth Corporate Achievement Award, Saturday night in Hollywood. Peter accepted this award alongside Evan Brooks for their work as Co-Founders of Digidesign, creators of Digidrums, Sound Tools, and of course the Pro Tools suite of digital recording products. Not to over-state the impact of Pro Tools and digital recording in general on the television industry, but this award has only been given four other times, most recently to NASA for their televisation of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. Peter adds this Emmy to a shelf which already holds a Grammy (Technical Achievement, 2001) and an Oscar (Scientific and Tech Academy Awards, 2004)
Peter is as humble as they come and prefers to dodge the spotlight so I hope he’ll forgive me for sharing a bit of what I’ve learned about Digidesign in the two years I’ve been blessed to work with him:
Digidesign was founded in 1983 but incorporated April Fool’s Day 1984 with approximately $14,000 made from some of Digi’s early sales of drum chips. The drum chips they sold were replacement drum sounds and installing them required actually swapping out the EPROM on your drum machine. Despite the technical challenge the sounds Peter edited and Eric engineered found their way into the hearts and minds of musicians, producers, and engineers everywhere. That signature big beat behind Tears For Fears or Howard Jones? That’s Digidrums. That Art Of Noise orchestra stab? You got it, tough guy.
But editing these drums meant staring at screens of hex for Peter, so when Jobs and Woz debuted the first Mac Peter and Evan were lined up at the proverbial Apple Store of the day to see if this new invention could save eyeball pain. As a result they created some of the very first audio software for the Mac, Sound Designer, a $1000 product which would allow you to edit and transfer samples to your Emax Emulator 2 or your Ensoniq Mirage.
A chapter in Digidesign’s history often either overlooked or taken for granted is their contribution to software synthesis. Softsynth and later TurboSynth were tools loved by educators and lovers of noise alike and were some of the key softwares a young Trent Reznor used to create the sounds on the first NIN record.
[note the caption on the page where this image came from: "Looks pretty complicated. Think it will catch on?"]
But eventually hard drives were introduced and DSP chips fabricated, and it started to become clear computers could be good at capturing sounds as well as creating them. Digidesign created Sound Tools, then Pro Tools, and the long-term course of the company began to unfold. When Digidesign went public Peter was the youngest CEO of a public company at the time and the company later merged with Avid to create an audio/video production powerhouse.
People refer to a company like Digidesign as if it was always there, they had no competition, and it’s path was always clear. I’ve personally found it insightful to get the real story from Peter, to hear that every year Digidesign had a formidable competitor (hard drive recorders from Yamaha, Kurzweil, etc) and that opening their product to 3rd party developers was both the most controversial decision they made as a company and the one that likely cemented their success. It’s inspiring now to recall the resistance of engineers and producers to digital recording, in fact most of them started by saying they’d never move from analog. In Peter’s words:
“Looking back it may seem like a revolution but the fact is it took time — fifteen years from the first 4-track Pro Tools to full adoption. There were armies of people who said they’d never record on computers. Many could intellectually look at Pro Tools and say ‘this is the future’ but few wanted to be the first and few truly wanted it to succeed. In fact a lot of people had a vested interest in digital recording not succeeding. We just kept working and kept trying to be the better answer. We improved the product year in year out, beating the naysayers and winning on merit in an industry that changes slowly.”
Hopefully those words are as inspiring to you as they are to me, a reminder that change is possible or actually inevitable but not to underestimate the time it may take or the resistance along the way. Even Peter tires of the Topspin / Pro Tools analogy but after two years I still find it apropos in many situations. I can only hope that we have a tiny fraction of the impact Digidesign, Peter, and Evan had on not just music but television and film, too. Congrats, gentlemen. You’re truly a daily inspiration.
Oh, Bob Moz has just one question for you, though… [CLICK]
When we first heard the award was billed as the “Philo T. Farnsworth Corporate Achievement Award” we all thought they had truly walked off the deep end when trying to name the technical award — we were picturing a smoke-filled room of TV comedy writers trying to come up with the nerdiest name imaginable, hitting paydirt, and rolling off the couch holding their stomachs. But upon inspection (via Wikipedia, of course) it turns out Philo T. Farnsworth is a True American Badass (TM) with a spot near the top in the badassery hall of fame.
Not only did Philo both invent electronic television and ban it from his home when he had children and realized there was nothing on it he wanted them to see, he made primary contributions to nuclear fusion research and his inventions contributed to radar and the electron microscope. And of course one can assume Prof Farnsworth on Futurama owes his name to Philo T.
Congratulations to our own True American Badass (TM), Peter Gotcher, drummer, 22 year husband, father, Digidesign founder, reformed venture capitalist, Pandora, Line 6, and Berklee College of Music board member, Topspin Chairman, and Exec Chairman of a little company called Dolby. We love you. Thanks for inviting us to the party.
Congrats to Peter on this great honor — and let’s not forget the whole team that made it happen in the early days — Mark, Evan, Chris, Don, Marina, Paul, and on and on and on. I was lucky enough to watch the first five years or so of the company from across the street. I learned a lot about how to grow a business from them.
There were indeed competitors hitting them both from above (large Japanese hardware companies) and below (small software upstarts) and Digi managed to thread the needle quite gracefully. And they changed the world of music technology while at it! Nice work.
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