Mark Vail enjoys improvising with synthesizers and electronic devices to make music his wife Christy considers strange. With a Minimoog and a Commodore 64, Vail earned an MFA in electronic music from Mills College in Oakland, CA, in 1983. Obsessed with Keyboard magazine since its inception as Contemporary Keyboard in 1975, Mark moved in 1977 from Miami, FL, to the Bay Area, where the magazine was based. Christy saw Keyboard’s ad for an editor in The San Francisco Chronicle in late 1987, and Mark convinced editor-in-chief Dominic Milano to hire him in January 1988. When synthesizer pioneer Bob Moog (1934-2005) decided in late 1989, after writing four Vintage Synths columns, that he’d rather look to the future instead of the past, Milano gave the column to Vail, leading to dozens of VS columns over two decades and the books Vintage Synthesizers (1993, 2000), The Hammond Organ: Beauty in the B (1997, 2002), and The Synthesizer (2014).
 
Mark developed and taught a computer music class based on Propellerhead Reason for middle through high school students at two private California schools from 2003-2014. For decades, he’s delved deeply into Serge and Eurorack modular synthesizers and battery-powered briefcase performance systems with LED lights. Since 2024, Vail has interviewed music industry friends for the NAMM Oral History Program (https://www.namm.org/library/oral-history).