Rodgers Instruments
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| Founded | May 1, 1958 |
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| Founder | Rodgers W. Jenkins Fred Tinker |
| Headquarters | 45°32′02″N 122°57′24″W / 45.5339°N 122.9568°WCoordinates: 45°32′02″N 122°57′24″W / 45.5339°N 122.9568°W, Hillsboro, Oregon, United States |
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Key people
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John Moesbergen, president |
| Products | classical church organs (digital and pipes, also combined) |
| Owner | 1988-2015 Roland 2016-Present Vandeweerd |
| Parent | Vandeweerd |
| Website | Rodgers Instruments Corporation |
Rodgers Instruments Corporation is an American manufacturer of classical and church organs. Rodgers was incorporated May 1,1958 in Beaverton, Oregon by founders, Rodgers W. Jenkins and Fred Tinker, employees of Tektronix, Inc., of Portland, Oregon, and members of a Tektronix team developing transistor-based oscillator circuits. Rodgers was the second manufacturer of solid state oscillator-based organs, completing their first instrument in 1958 (the first was the Gulbransen "B" home organ, introduced in July 1957. Both the Rodgers and the Gulbransen had vacuum-tube amplifiers. In 1962, upon introducing solid-state amplifiers, Rodgers became the world's first all-transistor organ). Other Rodgers innovations in the electronic organ industry include solid-state organ amplifiers (1962), single-contact diode keying (1961),reed switch pedal keying for pedalboards (1961), programmable computer memory pistons (1966), and the first MIDI-supported church organs (1986).
Rodgers' manufacturing facility and world headquarters is located in Hillsboro, Oregon. All Rodgers organs are built in the Oregon factory. Roland Classic organs, as of 2014, are built in the Oregon factory.
On January 4, 2016, Roland Corporation agreed to the Dutch Vandeweerd family’s acquisition of the American company Rodgers Instruments, effective January 15, 2016. The Vandeweerd family already owned three other organ brands: Johannus, Makin and Copeman Hart.
Rodgers' success was largely due to their early innovations with solid state analog tone generation technology. Despite the fact that competitors such as Allen switched to digitally synthesized tone generation as early as 1971, Rodgers sold exclusively analog tone generation instruments until 1990.
Rodgers introduced its first digital organ on November 20, 1990, using a tone generation system Rodgers has dubbed Parallel Digital Imaging (PDI). Rodgers PDI organs use Roland DSPs and digitally sampled organ pipes for tone generation.
A feature introduced in 1993, which Rodgers has termed "Digital Domain Expression," offers swell box effects such as expression delays, high frequency damping and phase shifts of sound across a stereo field as expression shoes are opened or closed, similar to the effects produced by the swell shades on a pipe organ's swell box.
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Wikipedia