Electronic musical instrument was designed to be a lower-cost alternative to a pipe organ for church music, musicians soon discovered that the Hammond was an excellent instrument for blues and jazz; indeed, an entire genre of music developed built around this instrument, known as the organ trio (typically Hammond organ, drums, and a third instrument, either saxophone or guitar). The first commercially manufactured synthesizer was the Novachord, built by the Hammond Organ Company from 1938 to 1942, which offered 72-note polyphony using 12 oscillators driving monostable-based divide-down circuits, basic envelope control and resonant low-pass filters. The instrument featured 163 vacuum tubes and weighed
Liu Yuan (musician) Liu Yuan (musician) Liu Yuan (, pronounced ; January 1, 1960 in Beijing, China) is a Chinese musician, who plays tenor and baritone saxophone as well as the Chinese wind instrument called "suona". He is recognized as one of the two most prominent jazz musicians in China, the other being the saxophonist Du Yinjiao. His father was a player of the "suona", a traditional Chinese wind instrument, and this was also Liu's first instrument. At about the age of eight, he began his performing career, playing in a government-run children's musical group. He continued his "suona" studies at the Beijing