Remembering Dave Smith, 1950–2022
sequential.com
sequential.com
Analog synths were phased out int the late 80’s by digital synthesizers, the main culprit being the Yamaha DX7. Those synths were mass produced, cheaper, they sounded great and they sounded different. Sequential fell into hard times and eventually got sold.
Dave Smith went to collaborate with other companies to produce new concepts.
More recently though, he came back to make his own synths under the DSI brand, and finally he regained control of the Sequential brand. Under Sequential he re-released the Prophet V. This all coincided with analog synths becoming popular again, with people craving the imperfect but very musical sound of analog synths.
This is a story of a great comeback, and I for one, am happy thinking he died doing what he loved, and after seeing his life’s work regaining the stardom it always deserved.
See https://hub.yamaha.com/keyboards/synthesizers/discovering-di...
The Minimoog and Prophet 5 are both from the 1970s. Despite the Minimoog's status as a collector's item today, it had roughly the same retail price as the DX7 in the 1980s--around $2000 USD. The Prophet 5 was more expensive at $4000, but it was also an incredibly successful, flagship synthesizer.
Of the synthesizers listed--Prophet 5, Oberheim OB-Xa, and Minimoog, only the Minimoog was made primarily out of discrete components. The others relied heavily on integrated circuits from SSM or CEM. (Obviously they all contain discrete components--but the synth modules in a Prophet 5 or Oberheim OB-Xa are basically ICs with some support circuitry.)
Sequential went out of business after developing the Prophet VS. Although it bears the "Prophet" name, it is a digital (or hybrid) synthesizer. It uses wavetables (like the PPG), but four of them simultaneously, with a Curtis VCF. It had a novel architecture (therefore confusing), the synthesizer itself was expensive, and there were some QA issues. It used TMS DSPs plus some custom ICs designed by Sequential. Apparently, during the design of the Prophet VS, there were various problems with the ICs that were fixed with kludges--Sequential wasn't in a financial position to make revisions to the ICs.
In other words, the R&D cost for digital synths was too high.
The low end of the analog market had been captured by budget polysynths from Korg and especially Roland which had most of the sound at much less of the price.
The problem wasn't the cost of digital R&D, it was commoditisation which turned a high-margin super expensive boutique professional market into a low-margin semi-pro and amateur commodity market with cheaper, less exclusive and less prestigious products.
The high-end market essentially disappeared and so do its distribution and promo channels. What was left supported a much smaller number of companies.
All of the headline synth companies went under at that point, no matter what tech they used - Sequential, Oberheim, Moog, PPG, ARP, Ensoniq, E-mu, and even Fairlight and eventually Synclavier. As well as also-rans like Octave, Gleeman, Crumar and Siel.
Korg also went under and were bought out by Yamaha.
Yamaha survived because it's a huge zaibatsu with deep pockets. Even with the DX7 the synth division is a sidenote on its bottom line.
Roland are also a huge corporation - mostly immensely profitable while also having street-level cool - and weathered the 80s and early 90s with some functional but clever hybrid models at relatively affordable prices.
Around 2005 the boutique market started to reappear, but aimed less at professionals and more at now-affluent collectors and dabblers who "always wanted one of those", and/or are willing to drop $$$$$ on something spendy just to prove they can.
So you get hipster-toy module makers in the Eurorack space, wildly overpriced Veblen toys like the OP 1, remakes of Classic Brands™, and various clones and reissues in both hardware and software form.
It's very nostalgic and backward looking, and I suspect there will be another shakeout before the end of the decade.
Which are used by artists all around (from amateur hobbyists to professional acts), they aren't "toy modules", there's been a lot of innovation in Eurorack and painting all of them as "toys" is a huge disservice to the whole format...
So this worked out well for those companies that were in a position to do a good job of both the ASIC and logic board development, and also use the resulting technology to address those broader markers - Yamaha being the pre-eminant example. (I agree with the point about the DX7 being a sidenote, but I'd say that all the other product lines that the tech eventually flowed into will have ended up being rather more than just a sidenote.)
Regarding the current market, despite all the retreads, I do think there's more interesting stuff going on than there has been for a long time (certainly in comparison to the analogue synth revival of the 90s), and I hope that manages to continue happening, even as I also kind of hope that the retro-appeal stuff will simmer down a bit.
One particularly great development is more affordable analog from the IK Multimedia UNO to the Korg Minilogue to the Sequential Take 5 to Behringer's Deepmind and Neutron (not to mention their clone army if it ever reaches production.)
Of course the VS has waveforms stored consecutively in ROM, with 32 more stored in NVRAM. That's just data. In wavetable synthesis, an entire table of consecutive waveforms is loaded into an oscillator. In vector synthesis, 4 individual and arbitrary waveforms are loaded into an oscillator.
It sounds like you use a different definition, which is fine. I don't think we're going to learn anything by litigating this kind of disagreement.
https://learningmodular.com/the-story-of-the-prophet-vs/
RIP Dave Smith.
I am currently recapping/restoring an Oberheim OB-Xa 8-voice. I just finished the power supply and now have eight voice cards that need about 13 parts, capacitors and mini-potentiometers, that need to be replaced on each. Each voice card has thirteen ICs but over one hundred discrete components. The main board has dozens of ICs and many other discrete components. The ICs replace the discrete components that comprised the oscillators, filters and VCAs but there are over a thousand discrete components in this synth.
Comparing a Minimoog with a DX7 is apples and oranges. They were released 13 years apart. the Moog has one voice while the DX sixteen voices. The U.S. inflation calculator puts the Minimoog at $11,884 in today's dollars and the DX at $5,790.
I find analogue synths pretty fascinating but if you are just using them to make music (as opposed to a hobby in themselves), there are far better ways, here in 2022.
Not to take anything away from Dave Smith, he was brilliant and his synths were the best you could get, in their day.
From the music producer perspective, your point of view sounds very true to me. Sometimes these synths are harder to get in the mix than a digital one, or a VST, as they take too much space! And using them is less convenient than a plug-in. But playing a VST feels much less exciting than one of these analogs. And I am saying this while owning a Virus, a digitone keys and Ableton Live.
how does it sounds compared to Prophet 6?
Prophet 6 sounds very good compared to OB-6.
:)
Architecturally, OB-6 and Prophet 6 are very similar as they share a lot of the same circuitry. They are both great synths, and I am sure I'd love a prophet 6 if I had one.
But I always perk up when I hear the Oberheim sound, more so than the prophet sound, and I do like very much the state-variable filter, which is not found in the P6. I enjoy making pad sounds with a notch filter, and be able to modulate it's shape towards a LP and a HP filters.
Compared to the Virus, the OB-6 sounds more alive when played with a keyboard. It's nuanced when played like this, sometimes like an old piano, where the Virus sounds equally full but very precise, which is great when sequenced and you want a bassline that sounds pristine, for example. I find the Digitone a bit in-between, as you can get pretty creative with the FM algos, and it also sounds very hi-fi.
I'm not trying to pick on people for using inferior gear, but explain that the people who spend more money on a keyboard are making very rational decisions. Just to pick your Pianoteq example, once you pair a $150 Pianoteq license with a $500 decent quality weighted MIDI keyboard, you're already in a price range where you could get good analogue gear if that's what you want.
Once you're spending $1k, $2k, $3k on gear, your main questions are going to be about things like ergonomics, personal taste, capabilities, etc. Not everyone is okay with using a laptop, getting a good laptop for use on stage has its own problems, and laptops add to the price. This isn't really that different from the amount of money you'd spend to get into other instruments, and is actually kind of cheap when you compare it to something like a concert violin--you'll even see high-school students with $5k violins, and I'm not talking about kids with rich parents, either.
Again, I'm not saying that there's something wrong with going for a $100 keyboard and your $180 license for u-he Diva. That's an excellent combo. Just trying to explain that there are reasons someone would want to spend much more money in the first place (ergonomics, portability, keyboard feel, etc.) and at those price points, analogue is an option.
It's funny. Dave Smith worked on the very first software instruments in the early 90's. He thought it wasn't really fun to use so he went back to creating analogue synths, his first product with his new company was the Evolver, the rest is history.
Turns out a lot of people don't find plugins very fun to use or inspiring, it's as simple as that. Smith was right since some people are willing to pay almost $5000 for a new Prophet 10 Rev4 in retail.
To get the same benefits of hardware in software, it requires a significantly different (for me, much less creative ) workflow, a very large investment of time, and you still will not quite get there in sound quality. But, at least you can take your whole studio with you on a laptop.
Source: I work with 2D meshes to models and even a single physical object can get almost infinitely deep and complex if you want to make it so.
A Rhodes has a set of metal tines that get plonked like a ruler on a table edge, rather like the tines on music boxes, and there’s a set of two tines, each with its own pickup for EACH NOTE on the keyboard!
https://www.fenderrhodes.com/service/tine-settings.html
https://www.vintagevibe.com/blogs/news/history-of-rhodes-pic...
Of course, you can use a sampled Rhodes and it’s only noticeable to either the player or if it’s not buried in a mix of a zillion other tracks, there is a notable lack of depth to it. Like most things on computers: “good enough” wins the day.
I switched to purely virtual synthesis in 1999, and have spent the last 5 years revisiting physical musical instruments as I lament the electronification of music I was such a fan of for 20-30 years
Keith Bloemer of GuitarML has already done this with guitar amps (https://github.com/guitarml)
That's nothing compared to what's readily available today; this isn't 8 years ago when CPUs were stagnant.
Musicians, especially, are much slower to upgrade hardware and software than other users because of the risk that something breaks during the upgrade--there are just so many different pieces of software that can break. A lot of musicians with Macs stayed on Mojave for a few years after it became obsolete just so they could run 32-bit programs, even though the writing has been on the wall for 32-bit programs since the very beginning of the Mac on x86 era.
Not always. Consider Robert Rich's very serious idea of "egoless" music which isn't intended to command attention but to leave space for the listener's own internal attention and creation.
In his sleep concerts listeners even fall in and out of unconsciousness, presumably experiencing some interesting dreams as well.
> music expressly built for distracted people on shitty speakers they can barely hear
An apt description for many things, from wax cylinders to AM radio to MP3 to to music played on smartphones. Which is to say: all popular music since the 1890s, "serious" or not.
Sure, an emulated Rhodes might be indistinguishable once it's gone through the audio production and mastering meat grinder. But the real question is whether a musician will even want to put one through that if the sound doesn't inspire them the moment they sit down and play it.
I use a mixture of analog and digital synths. While I appreciate the power and flexibility of emulations, I've never been inspired to make music as much as I am when I press a key on an analog synth.
This really not true anymore.
Pianoteq includes several e-piano models and it runs just fine on a typical laptop. It also includes physically modelled acoustic pianos, harpsichords and several other instruments. All run fine on a typical laptop.
But there are two things primarily that you get with physical instruments:
- A bunch of limitations. You're more likely to dive into deeply understanding your instrument if it can only do a well-defined set of things. This is counterintuitive, but absolutely true. If you're using VSTs, you should similarly force yourself to use only a small set of them, and to swap them out very rarely.
- A tactile interface. Generic MIDI controllers just don't do as well. There is a gap in playability between the two.
That said, I usually explore on a physical synth and often end up using a soft-synth in finished tracks. A physical synth is a lot more fun to jam on than a MIDI controller. It may be possible to build a physical controllers or modular controllers that captures more of that feeling (and a lot of high-end physical synths these days are just ARM systems running real-time Linux), but the run-of-the-mill MIDI controllers are not that.
(Reference: have worked for two companies that produce VSTs, including the biggest of them)
Daws are practical for actually making and producing music.
In reality though they can complement each other nicely. You can sketch on hardware and even integrate it into a daw.
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My personal thought on superiority of sound is same as records and film - if you feel a particular specific past sound (or image) is the pinnacle of possibilities, soft synths will indeed asymptotically recreate it and may or may not ever recapture whatever "feel" it is that makes that specific sound superior to you.
I came into this late and without preconception so all sounds are equally valid with no absolute framework and all synths CAN produce interesting cool useful and usable awesome sounds - I'd rather marvel at creativity and variety than endlessly try to recapture something previous (which even my favourite companies are sometimes stuck doing - how many ways can roland and others re re re re re create the Jupiter 8 sound?? Same for Moog etc)
My 100 Croatian lipa and no more :-)
Interestingly the softsynths they target are clones of classic synths. It gives people the classic interfaces, but with a lot more flexibility with tracking and automation. They seem cool.
You still miss out on knobs/buttons/switches etc., but you can make use of the spatial memory that each synth/module’s design promotes, and that’s pretty big. I can envision a VR controller extension with a physical knob for adjustments that would improve the experience, but it’s probably too niche a product to be built anytime soon.
https://www.soundonsound.com/news/synthspace-virtual-modular...
There is a huge one - unique sounds!
You will see that comment over and over from pro's who make their living creating sounds for TV/movies - this guy's channel is fascinating if you really want a peek "under the covers" https://www.youtube.com/c/NeilParfittMusic
Found him for the Mac Pro review when it was rare and new, stayed for the fascinating insight into the pro music world and the mind of an ultra audio geek!
As yet, no one has managed to create a controller for soft synths that is sufficient to give them this versatility. (IMO: They would need an OLED display on every control, and a traditional keyboard with poly-aftertouch, and a template and control standard to reconfigure it for common soft-synths. NKS doesn't even come close.) I'm sure it will happen, but so far it has not.
His comeback is legendary. The Prophet 6 is huge in music today, not to mention all the other new and rereleased synths he fostered.
which genres?
But the two synths sound very similar.
What Dave Smith did with the Prophet-5 (not V) was something much more important. The Prophet-5 was the first significant synthesizer on the market with patch storage and recall, and this required for the first time RAM and a CPU in a synthesizer. Patch storage was absolutely revolutionary. It changed the entire synthesizer field. Realizing the potential of a CPU inside a synthesizer, Dave Smith then went on to propose what later became MIDI.
I think of the 4/8-voice as predecessors to later analog polysynths (including models from Sequential, Oberheim, etc.) because they were more like a collection of mono (SEM) modules that you could play polyphonically. The Korg Mono/Poly and even the DSI Tetra are a bit like that too (and kind of fun to play polyphonically in voice cycling mode where every voice is a bit different.)
We are amazingly fortunate to have modern incarnations of Sequential and Oberheim making amazing instruments, from the Prophet 5 reissue (and affordable/portable Take 5) to the upcoming OB-X8.
The Wavestation seems like it's just barely on the older side of a dividing line between digital synthesizers and romplers. Take a look at digital keyboards like the Yamaha DX7, Roland D-50, Casio CZ-101, Kawai K1m, or Ensoniq ESQ-1. They're all synthesizers, you use them to make sounds. You can use them as preset machines (and I'm sure most people did), but they have a ton of possibilities for sound design.
Then came the Korg M1, E-mu Proteus, Yamaha SY85, etc. These machines are more like "a bunch of sounds in a box"--you buy the box, you get access to all of the sounds recorded in ROM. You get a bunch of standard sounds like acoustic and electric pianos, bass guitars, strings, saxophone, etc. These keyboards have no realistic sounds and limited opportunities for sound design, but they are incredibly flexible from a musical perspective. If I show up to a jam session or an open mic with a keyboard, that keyboard had better have a good palette of acoustic & electric sounds.
The Wavestation is a fantastic instrument but what keyboardists wanted in 1990 was, you know, samples of all the acoustic and electric instruments on tap, but the Wavestation had no acoustic piano or drums. The Wavestation was not commercially successful, even though it's a fantastic piece of gear. The revised Wavestation EX got acoustic piano samples and drums but it still focused on synthesizer-like sounds. Ironically, the synthesizer-like sounds are what people like about the Wavestation these days.
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/korg-wavestation-tip...
I have a Wavestation SR at home, and it's really cool, but I can see why it wasn't as commercially successful as its competitors.
The Roland JD-800 (from 1991) basically has the same story--the JD-800 is a digital synth made in an era when people really wanted romplers.
Both the Wavestation and JD-800 got recent rereleases in cute, miniature formats as the Korg Wavestate and Roland JD-08.
> Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.
Same reason why we see new video games that look they belong on the original PlayStation.
The real sell to me is flexibility. The synths sound cool, but I'm only going to bring one instrument. Romplers support a diversity of styles of music and roles in the band.
i absolutely get distracted by DAWs
Funny how that works - something that fails in its original purpose turns out to be great for something else.
DX7 synth piano and M1 sampled piano are classics and the "dance piano" lives to this day.
FM piano/rhodes sounds (and DX7 presets) also fueled 80s ballads.
Roland TR-808, 909 and TB-303 were picked up from bargain bins, fueled entire new genres of music, and turned into classics for the ages.
The MIDI spec is basically as important as TCP-IP in the synth world, because it is an open standard anybody could implement for free.
Rest in peace, thoughts and prayers to friends and family.
MIDI isn't just a transport protocol, it's the whole stack including an encoding scheme and a physical layer. It's like inventing ASCII, TCP-IP and Ethernet cables all at the same time. [0]
While there have been a number of significant extensions to the basic protocol since 1983 (e.g. General MIDI, machine control, sample dump standard, etc), and alternate hardware layers have been added (e.g. MIDI over USB), amazingly very little of the core standard changed until recently. Many devices still have 5-pin DIN jacks on them, and the instruments from the first public demo in 1983 could be connected to a brand new device and talk to each other today. The MIDI 2.0 spec was only adopted in 2020.
Dave Smith and Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi received a technical Grammy award in 2013 for their work on MIDI.
If HN is interested I’d be happy to do an AMA later. Dave was my mentor and friend for the past 15 years. I got to know him and his family well. It will be a challenge to hold up the torch he started but we’re gonna do our best
Going forward I can't help but feel anxious about the future of sequential. I hope you will all be given the authority to continue and innovate in the Sequential way, the way in which Daves spirit can be carried on. I have no doubt nor does anyone else in the community that you guys will kick ass. Thanks again for everything you have all done and will continue to do. Please do an AMA when you are feeling up to it. Love, J
The Prophet T8 of course featured polyphonic aftertouch and its keybed was also used in the Synclavier.
With current and upcoming keyboards like the HydraSynth, Iridium keyboard and UB-Xa we may be entering a polyphonic aftertouch renaissance.
(The HydraSynth even has a ribbon controller like the CS-80...)
I'd love to see a new Sequential synth with a polyphonic aftertouch keybed like the one used in the Iridium.
Yes please!
At some level, people go into this business because it's a labor of love. The skills that so many people in the electronic music equipment industry have are worth a lot more outside of music. Electrical engineers (especially the combination of analog and digital), firmware, DSP, etc. are all so valuable in other industries, but the sales numbers in music equipment are nothing like general consumer electronics.
Thank you for all your creations, Dave. And thank you for keeping them affordable, given their tremendous design complexity and musical capabilities.
(The linked page is light on details)
Thanks Dave for the beautiful instruments and for transforming the musical world.
Collaboration with Tom Oberheim another legend of the synth world.