Tim Carleton – Opus 1. If you’re ever placed on hold by a business, chances are you’ll be listening to Cisco’s stock hold music. Among the best known due to its default presence on Cisco Call Manager is “Opus Number One” by Tim Carleton and high-school friend Darrick Deel, who recorded it on a four-track tape recorder in 1989. In a YouTube video, Tim mentioned the following on how he created the sound and why the stereo version is not very good: The reason was that I used an Alesis Midiverb II or III, specifically the 3 tap pan, to hide the fact that I was playing this live on a DX7IIFD and the notes would either cut off when I’d play unison patches and run out of polyphony or when I’d change patches. Solution: Plug it in mono to the midiverb on one side, R8 on the other side, stereo into the tascam, and go.
The former of the duo was a 16-year-old “Yanni-loving computer nerd, messing around with a drum machine and a synthesizer in his parents’ garage in California,” according with an interview with him in 2014 on “This American Life.” The song went forgotten for almost a decade until some time in the ’90s. A that time, Deel, it turned out, had gone on to work for the then-startup Cisco in building the company’s first VoIP phone. When a need for default on hold music came up, he recalled the track he and Carleton had recorded. “I’ve got this piece of music that I know sounds really good on the phone,” he recalled saying in an NBC Bay Area feature. He reached out to Carleton for approval. “Next thing I know it was going into the product.”
While IT admins who are so inclined can customise their system’s hold music, most don’t bother. And, as it turns out, the out-of-the-box music actually has a legion of fans.There are hundreds of comments about the song on YouTube videos, parodies, and remixes. Though some people can’t stand it, most of the comments sing its praises: ‘Best hold music ever made. I love this song.’ ‘So addictively pleasant. Please, put me back on hold so I can listen to it some more.’ ‘I work in a call centre, and this music is the best to listen to after dealing with rude customers.’
The hold music was later featured in a 2023 Bud Light commercial that aired during Super Bowl that had many people wondering, “Why do I know this song?” . It is has also featured in a This American Life episode called “Stuck in the Middle,” wherein a man is obsessed with finding the name and creator of the “haunting” melody.
Tim Carleton is now an IT professional in the Bay Area spending minimal time on music. “I think it’s probably my most legit claim as a music artist. I didn’t make any money from my music,” he said. When asked how he feels when he’s put on hold to his own music? “It’s really embarrassing when you’re not expecting to hear that and then, all of a sudden, you have that memory pop up,” he said. “I just start blushing immediately.”
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