Gentle Electric

Remember the Gentle Electric 101 Pitch Follower? Carl Fravel dropped by in the comments and left a link to the Gentle Electric website.

"While working at Aries Music in the Fall of 1976, Carl Fravel had some conversations with Dennis Colin, the designer of the Arp2600 and of the Aries, about pitch following for analog synthesizer control. Dennis had prototyped a pitch follower using cascading octave lowpass filters, but didn't create a product from it. After leaving Aries, Carl founded Gentle Electric, for which he designed a pitch follower a using a different approach (a time-domain pattern recognition algorithm), and included envelope following and envelope triggering features. Gentle Electric's early business included custom synthesizer work and prototype quantity circuit board manufacturing, until the pitch follower was ready for manufacturing. Approximately 200 of these pitch followers were sold over the next 10 years. The pitch follower existed in 5 configurations..."