Allen Mollenhauer – started playing the guitar as a young boy of 9. All of his favorite cowboy heroes played the guitar and he fell in love with their music. His first guitar was a Gibson L50. He stills plays it today but also has other guitars. Allen has played for many years in folk groups at his church and his favorite activity is playing his guitar at home for his own pleasure and for family and friends. While Allen worked as an electrical engineer for many years, his first love was his music. As an engineer he is used to thinking about problems and solutions and he saw a relationship in music theory and mathematical problems.
Doreen Mollenhauer – VP of Marketing, is responsible for the sale and servicing of clients for the DoreenAllen Co.
What Inspired Us?
As an engineer – He was used to thinking about problems and their solutions. The slide rule was his most important tool and was used to solve math problems. He pictured a similar tool solving his music related problems. His first attempt at developing this tool was to use a fixed octave of notes with their half tones with another octave and half tones that would slide under the fixed one. But as he slid the movable octave to the right, some of the right most notes on the movable octave didn’t have any notes above them to be referred to and likewise on the left side some of the notes on the fixed octave didn’t have any notes below them. So he doubled the amount of octaves on each line and again ran into the same problem. Then he thought about using a circular approach and that finally solved the problem.
At this point though, he didn’t have a means of orderly determining the notes in a given scale, the notes that make up a particular chord or to point to the corresponding notes and chord roots when changing keys. This is where the Index Pointer scale comes in. It points to the notes in a given scale as well as the half tones. He placed this scale between the others and “voila” the transposer wheel.
Remember:
Music – is nothing but an inspiration of notes put together to convey the composer’s feelings.
Scales – are made up of particular notes from A through G#.
Chords – are made up of three or more notes played together.