Chris Huggett

Chris Huggett is a British engineer and designer who co-founded Electronic Dream Plant (EDP), founded Oxford Synthesizer Company and who is currently design consultant for Novation Digital Music Systems, all manufacturers of audio synthesizers.

In 1977, Huggett had been working for Ferrograph, for 3M in their digital multi-track division, and as a freelance studio maintenance engineer. He met up with synthesist Adrian Wagner (a descendant of the German composer Richard Wagner), who had ideas for an inexpensive synthesizer. Electronic Dream Plant (commonly abbreviated to EDP), a British sound synthesizer manufacturing firm in Oxfordshire was formed.

Huggett designed EDP's most successful product, the Wasp, a synthesizer with a hybrid digital VCO / analog VCF design. Employing a unique contact keyboard (with no moving parts), the Wasp was priced at £199, which was less than half the price of any comparable synth at the time Huggett later designed the Spider sequencer and the Gnat synthesizer before EDP's demise in the end of 1981 or 1982.

After EDP, Huggett went on to form Oxford Synthesizer Company (OSC) with financing and management from his parents. He designed the OSC OSCar with Paul Wiffen and Anthony Harris-Griffin. The OSCar was intended to be an affordable yet sophisticated performance synthesizer with state-of-the-art sounds. The OSCar was a more substantial synthesizer than the Wasp, with dual oscillators and a full-size three-octave keyboard. The OSCar was also one of the first programmable synthesizers, and included both an arpeggiator and a step sequencer.

Huggett later moved on to Akai, where he wrote the operating system for the Akai S1000 sampler alongside David Cockerell, who designed the hardware. Huggett remained at Akai for successive models of Akai's rackmount sampler line, including the S3200, whose operating system he completed in 1993.

While working for Akai, Huggett provided advice and support to Novation's founders, working on the development of the BassStation, which had the Wasp filter in it. He later joined Novation full time to design the Novation Supernova. Huggett's involvement with Novation has continued through many of their hardware synths and MIDI controllers ever since, including the Nova family of synths and the ReMOTE & ReMOTE SL series of controllers.

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