Mu-Tron
 |
|
| Industry | Music |
|---|---|
| Successor | Gizmo Incorporated |
| Founded | 1972 |
| Founder | Mike Beigel and Aaron Newman |
| Headquarters | Rosemont, New Jersey, United States |
| Products | Electronic musical effects |
| Website | www |
Musitronics, often shortened to Mu-tron, was a manufacturer of electronic musical effects active in the 1970s. Founded by Mike Beigel and Aaron Newman, the company's product line focused on filtering and processing effects derived from synthesizer components. The company was known for producing high-quality products with many user-adjustable parameters, but high production costs and a failed product line, the Gizmotron, caused its downfall.
Their best-known product was the Mu-tron III envelope filter, "the world's first envelope-controlled filter", first made in 1972 and quickly becoming an essential effect for many funk musicians. It was taken in production again, in a modified version, in 2014.
The Musitronics Corporation of Rosemont, New Jersey was formed in 1972 by Mike Beigel and Aaron Newman, an engineer who worked at Guild Guitar Company. Beigel had been working on a synthesizer project for Guild, but the project was dropped after Guild's president, Al Dronge, was killed in an accident. The new president was less interested in the synthesizer project, and Beigel teamed up with a former Guild engineer, Aaron Newman, to save what he could, and formed Musitronics. They extracted sections from the synthesizer to make a stand-alone audio effect out of it; the result was an envelope filter, the Mu-tron III, built in the summer of 1972, which proved popular and viable enough with major music instrument retailers to build the company on. Musitronic built a plant out of a former chicken coop in Rosemont, and soon employed 35 people.
The company offered traditional effects such as simple phase shifters, flangers, and foot-operated wah pedals as well. With George Merriman, former partner of guitarist and guitar and effect builder Dan Armstrong, Mutronics built the Octave Divider, and later made the Armstrong plug-in effects.
In 1978 Musitronics was sold to synthesizer company ARP Instruments in 1979, on a royalty basis, but ARP folded before the original owners of Musitronics could ever collect any money. Musitronics became Gizmo Incorporated and continued to try their hand at products, but it ended when Aaron Newman suffered a heart attack.
By 2014 Beigel returned to making effects with his new company Mu-FX, producing a "modified and miniaturized version" of the Mu-Tron III, renamed the Tru-Tron 3X.
...
Wikipedia