Who We
Are
 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.
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