meatballfulton wrote:If you actually look at the names of people who design synth presets, an awful lot of them design for multiple companies. It's a relatively recent phenomenon (only the last decade, really) that mfrs started using the names of their designers for marketing purposes.
Ya back in the day no one heard of these guys!

After the DX-7 set the benchmark, Casio Had Andrew Schlesinger do the Casio VZ-1, but they didn't use entirely his sounds (they should have!). Roland hire in programmers for the D50, it was mainly Eric Persing did those I think. Robby Kilgore is a name that comes up a lot, he started as a Fairlight programmer and was on the Korg M1 team (as was Schlesinger). I think Korg still use the same guys.
Pretty much all of these guys (no gals AFAIK) were/ are session keyboard players or sales reps who did trade shows for the companies, mostly US and UK. Paul Wiffen is one with a history- helped develop the Wasp and the Oscar, sold it to a few people, did a lot of EII session work, did the Yamaha TX16W UK library also made the famous Elka Synthex Laser harp, among other things.