Technical Innovation in Popular Music

Jeffrey Vallier is a senior firmware engineer with Gibson Guitar Corporation in their Labs Division. Jeffrey Vallier started playing guitar at age 10 and was in a band by age 13, playing through high school and college. He began his studies in electrical engineering at ISU in 1986, transferring to The Evergreen State College to complete his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and music composition in 1991. Returning to ISU as a graduate student, he received a research grant after winning a design contest sponsored by AMD. He held an adjunct faculty position and spent two years researching a patent for his design. In 1995, he started a company, Pefftronics, at the ISU Research Park to commercialize the audio signal processing technology he designed. He moved to California in 1998 to take a job at Siemens Microelectronics, and then joined Gibson in 2000 as a senior firmware engineer to develop hardware for their MaGIC comunications protocol. He is now working on embedding the protocol in a single chip.