Resurrected ’80s music gear gives filmmaker a view of her late inventor father

When Alison Tavel asked family members about the father she never had a chance to know, Don Tavel frequently was described as a genius who could do no wrong.

When she researched Indianapolis newspaper and TV coverage of Don Tavel in the 1980s, she came across an imaginative intellectual with unlimited potential.

But the picture seemed incomplete to Alison, who was just 10 weeks old when Don—an inventor and son of Dr. Tavel optometry business founder David Tavel—died in a 1988 car crash.

She says the Resynator, a nearly forgotten music synthesizer, helped her to comprehend Don as flawed and accomplished and, most important, a real person.

Alison plucked a Resynator, her father’s concept for an instrument-controlled synthesizer, from her grandmother’s attic in Carmel a decade ago. She eventually traveled across the United States and to Colombia and England to learn what Don’s invention meant to musicians and other people in the industry. In England, she visited Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Peter Gabriel, whose synthesizer distribution company purchased three Resynators in 1981.

“The Resynator was this unbiased thing I could trust,” Tavel said. “It was the vehicle for me to get to know my dad in a very unconventional way. It’s really the only thing that went straight from him to me. Stories go through someone else. Things that people give me go through someone else.”

Tavel captured her journey of discovery as a first-time filmmaker. Her documentary, titled “Resynator,” will be shown locally Friday and Tuesday as part of the Heartland International Film Festival. The movie won the audience award for best feature documentary at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival, and movie distribution company The Forge is planning a theatrical release for “Resynator” on Nov. 15.

Tavel is 36, the same age Don was at the time of his death. It wouldn’t be accurate to say the daughter devoted a lot of time over the years to wondering about her father and his breakthrough in plugging guitars and other instruments into a modular piece of hardware to generate otherworldly sounds.

In the film, Alison says years passed when she rarely thought of Don at all. Following his death, Alison moved with her mother, Tamara, and sister, Alexi, to Cincinnati. In the late 1990s, Alan Rosenberg became Alison’s stepfather.

Thoughts of Don and his synthesizer were rekindled when Alison worked as an assistant to Grace Potter, a singer-songwriter known for recording hit duets with Kenny Chesney.

“I wasn’t a musician, but I toured and I was surrounded by musicians and crew,” Tavel said. “I wanted to contribute to the conversation when people talked about gear and instruments and their latest pedal and the soundboard and the mixing console. I had this one thing that might be cool to contribute: My dad invented a synthesizer. That was the spark of what would come. It was just this honest curiosity. … Then I realized it was about something so much deeper than that.”

Renaissance man

Former Indianapolis radio personality Cris Conner met Don Tavel when the Resynator’s inventor played guitar in the Black Magic Blues Band, a group founded on the campus of North Central High School.

Conner worked for bygone station WNAP-FM 93.1, a youth culture magnet that debuted in 1968 and dominated the Indianapolis airwaves in the 1970s.

“He was a man of so many interests, it was hard to pin him down to any one thing,” Conner said of Tavel.

Conner and Tavel were part of a self-described “hippie” crew that gathered in Holliday Park in the late 1960s. Tavel made headlines in the North Central student newspaper when he bought a sitar. He became a member of high-IQ society Mensa, and in the 1980s he purchased a hyperbaric chamber for personal oxygen treatments.

Work on the Resynator began in 1974. Tavel was encouraged when the Average White Band, known for mid-1970s instrumental hit “Pick Up the Pieces,” used the Resynator during a recording session.

Tavel exhibited his synthesizer at the nation’s top music trade show, NAMM, and the device had enough buzz to snag private demonstrations for Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney.

By the early 1980s, it was time for Resynator’s public debut. Unfortunately, this part of the story was over before it began. Tavel’s Indianapolis-based company, Musico, received orders for 200 units, but none were produced.

This failure to launch is one of the mysteries of the “Resynator” documentary, but competition might have been a factor. Shortly before Tavel’s synthesizer was set for release, the Korg corporation introduced its X-911 guitar synthesizer. The X-911’s suggested retail price was $500, in contrast to the Resynator’s $1,980.

Conner said Tavel didn’t appear to be overly discouraged when the Resynator didn’t move forward.

“I don’t think anything took the wind out of his sails,” Conner said. “At some point, he was asked to take over marketing at his father’s business. He had the Tavel company pretty well into the future in terms of the development of computers at a business.”

Tavel also created Animation Station, a computer graphic concept that used videotape as the basis for animated images.

In the mid-1980s, he taught an IUPUI course on the history of rock music, and in 1976, he earned the first master’s degree in music from the Indiana University Center for Electronic and Computer Music.

Resynator’s future

The Donald Louis Tavel Digital Arts Research Center was established at IUPUI in 1998. The center, now part of Indiana University Indianapolis, is working on a new version of the Resynator more than 40 years after the project was abandoned.

Alison Tavel brought the idea to Scott Deal, director of the Tavel center, in 2017. Harry Chaubey, a doctoral student at the school, recently completed five prototypes of the 21st century Resynator.

“We created a synthesizer that is exactly the Resynator of 1980, but using modern components and modern architecture,” Deal said.

The hardware will be licensed to Alison Tavel for marketing the synthesizer, Deal said.

“We took the handwritten schematics and analyzed them,” Deal said of Don Tavel’s work with California-based engineer Mike Beigel, who’s known as the inventor of Mu-Tron effects pedals popularized by funk guitarists. “We had to do some reverse engineering and some inventive engineering to create a new blueprint. Now we’re executing it.”

Deal said the original Resynator represented a step toward ease of use and increased accessibility for musicians who weren’t synthesizer specialists.

“The Resynator was part of a very small group of synthesizers that were ahead of their time, and their distinguishing features proved to be prescient as they became mainstream over the next decade,” he said.

Meanwhile, Alison Tavel is working with Rob Rampley, co-founder of Seattle-based music tech company Media Overkill, on a software version of the Resynator.

Gabriel, formerly of the band Genesis and a chart-topping solo artist thanks to hits such as “Sledgehammer,” suggested a software version of the synthesizer as a possible next step when speaking with Tavel in the “Resynator” film.

He also grasped that the vintage Resynator unit, once advertised as “Small Box, Big Tricks,” was Tavel’s gateway to learning more about Don.

“She’s trying to feel the work and then the mind and heart of her dad through this journey,” Gabriel says in the documentary.

Mixed emotions

Beyond promoting “Resynator,” Tavel has a day job as archivist for Tom Petty’s estate. She directed a 2021 video for Petty song “Drivin’ Down to Georgia.” The estate’s latest project is a reissue of a 1983 film documentary titled “Heartbreakers Beach Party.” Cameron Crowe directed the film, which will be shown in theaters on Oct. 17 and Oct. 20.

“I worked with the team to restore all the footage,” she said.

The “Resynator” documentary offers joyful moments, such as the recording of dance tune “Que Paso” by Christian Castagno and Colombian band Systema Solar. Comedian-musician Fred Armisen tells jokes into a microphone as a way of experimenting with the Resynator. Audiences also see Alison soldering a circuit board, a task she didn’t envision a decade ago.

Yet anguish is present when Tavel learns about points of friction in her father’s private life.

“I didn’t want to change anybody’s perspective of who my dad was to them,” she said. “That wasn’t the point of this story. The point of this story was for me to understand and digest and accept and love and learn about my dad from my perspective. I knew by doing that, it might be painful to other people who don’t have that same perspective that I gained.”

Don’s father, David, opened the first Tavel optometry shop in downtown Indianapolis in 1946. David Tavel, a frequent golfing partner of late Indiana Pacers co-owner Mel Simon, died in 2002. Don’s mother, Yetta “Kitty” Katz Tavel, appears in “Resynator.” Known as a co-founder of the docent program at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Kitty died in 2018.

The film reveals that the marriage of Alison’s parents fell apart immediately after she was born. At one point, she questioned the value of finishing the documentary.

“I thought, ‘This is such a hard film,’” Tavel said. “‘My private life is being filmed. I’m not going to release this.’ I just wanted to tell a story about a synth.”

Ultimately, she viewed “Resynator” as a possible catalyst for healing relationships.

“People get really emotional and tell me their stories,” Tavel said of film screenings where she meets attendees. “Maybe this film could reconnect somebody. I’m not trying to sound like I’m going to cure world hunger or anything, but I would love it if this film inspired somebody to reach out to a loved one and have an open conversation, as hard as it might be.”•