Keith Barr, best known as a founder of Alesis, has recently passed away, leaving a big imprint onto the music production world. As a long time user of Alesis instruments and sound effects (a legendary QS6.1 is still doing great job as a master keyboard in my home studio, after all these years) I have come to appreciate professional quality and musicality of these devices.

This outstanding engineer and music lover, Keith Barr was also a serious scientist, with strong background in physics, which allowed him to come up with some ground-up, revolutionary inventions, such as ADAT (Alesis Digital Audio Tape) which quickly became a de facto industry standard.

"We walk into a room, we clap our hands and we get this marvellous echo coming back, so we work on putting it in a box. …Effects don’t start here from people imagining what could be generated by electronic processors — we hear natural phenomena, which we try to duplicate. All today’s effects have grown from that."

While reading the Keith’s 1996 interview for Sound On Sound Magazine,  his passion and vision for future development of the digital sound comes across very clearly.

There’s no end to reverb. It’s like a violin — you can always make a better one. It remains an intellectual pursuit, but it’s also a matter of trading off cost and performance, and refining the involved elements to come up with the best and most cost-effective solution.

Thanks to people like Keith Barr, we musicians are able to create in our home studios music of astounding sonic quality, unimaginable only 15-20 years ago. His legacy will live forever in thousands of music recordings done using  his innovative instruments and digital sound devices.