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| - A manufacturer of synth equipment in the late 1970s and early '80s. The company's founder, Californian Bob Easton, was an acquaintance of Tom Oberheim and the two collaborated on some pitch converter designs circa 1975. 360's first product, introduced around 1977, was the Slavedriver, a pitch-to-CV/gate converter that, in theory, could be used with any instrument and would control an analog synthesizer with CV/gate inputs. 360 and Oberheim jointly marketed a package consisting of the Slavedriver and an Oberheim SEM, aimed mainly at singers and players of brass and woodwind instruments, advertising that the package allowed the performer to control the SEM with their voice or instrument Another package consisted of the Slavedriver and an Oberheim OB-1; this was advertised mainly to guitarist
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| abstract
| - A manufacturer of synth equipment in the late 1970s and early '80s. The company's founder, Californian Bob Easton, was an acquaintance of Tom Oberheim and the two collaborated on some pitch converter designs circa 1975. 360's first product, introduced around 1977, was the Slavedriver, a pitch-to-CV/gate converter that, in theory, could be used with any instrument and would control an analog synthesizer with CV/gate inputs. 360 and Oberheim jointly marketed a package consisting of the Slavedriver and an Oberheim SEM, aimed mainly at singers and players of brass and woodwind instruments, advertising that the package allowed the performer to control the SEM with their voice or instrument Another package consisted of the Slavedriver and an Oberheim OB-1; this was advertised mainly to guitarists. The next product was the Spectre guitar synthesizer. This basically combined the Slavedriver and the guts of a SEM into a single box. Equipped with a hex pickup, the Spectre contained a priority circuit that chose a string to track, fed it into the pitch converter and an envelope follower, and used this to control the bullt-in SEM. There was also a large six-voice polyphonic system, with a pitch converter, envelope follower, and SEM for each string. Only a few examples of this were built. These products were not particularly successful. The state of the art in frequency and pitch tracking in 1978 was not really up to the task, as some other manufacturers, notably ARP, found out. The company branched out into effects and small MIDI sound modules in the mid-1980s, before exiting the music industry around 1988. 360 Systems is still in business today (September 2015), but now focuses on video production hardware.
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