Graham Blyth
| Graham Blyth | |
|---|---|
| Born |
22 March 1948 Chessington, Surrey, England |
| Genres | Rock and classical music |
| Occupation(s) | Audio design engineer, organist, conductor |
| Instruments | Pipe organ, electronic organ, piano, harpsichord |
| Labels | Harvest |
Graham Blyth is an English audio engineer who is known for designing mixing consoles. He is a co-founder of Soundcraft, a manufacturer which Blyth helped form into a world leader in sound reinforcement and recording mixers, establishing the "British sound". After succeeding in electrical engineering he became a professional organist, performing on pipe organs around the world. Blyth is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) and the Audio Engineering Society (AES). In 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree in science from the University of Hertfordshire.
Blyth was born 22 March 1948 in Chessington; his father was an architect and his mother a teacher and painter. He was schooled from an early age in Epsom, Surrey, England. He began studying the piano at the age of four years, and in his teens worked to gain a scholarship to Trinity College of Music in London. There, he learned the play the organ, then transferred to the University of Bristol in 1966 to study electronic engineering, a decision made easier because he was "hopelessly infatuated with an astonishingly pretty girl from my social group at home who'd gone up the year before." At Bristol, Blyth founded the Student Music Society, and studied orchestra conducting; as a senior he conducted a performance of Bach's complex masterpiece St Matthew Passion. After college, he obtained a position with the Compton Organ Company in their research department where he met Bill Kelsey, his early mentor, who showed him how to lay out circuits on printed circuit boards. Compton was "on its last legs", according to Blyth, and he left to join Graseby Instruments where he designed electronic filters for underwater weapons to satisfy Admiralty contracts. Blyth spent evenings at Kelsey's Notting Hill flat helping him assemble a large mixing desk, one used by Emerson, Lake & Palmer at the "legendary" Isle of Wight Festival 1970. With this success, Kelsey left Compton to form with a business partner the professional audio equipment company Kelsey & Morris.
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