Dave Smith, Whose Synthesizers Formed Digital Music, Dies at 72

Not like a piano or organ, early synthesizers, just like the Moog and ARP, might generate just one be aware at a time. Shaping a selected tone concerned setting a number of knobs, switches or dials, and attempting to breed that tone afterward meant writing down all of the settings and hoping to get related outcomes the following time.

The Prophet-5, which Mr. Smith designed with John Bowen and launched in 1978, conquered each drawbacks. Controlling synthesizer features with microprocessors, it might play 5 notes directly, permitting harmonies. (The corporate additionally made a 10-note Prophet-10.) The Prophet additionally used microprocessors to retailer settings in reminiscence, offering reliable but personalised sounds, and it was moveable sufficient for use onstage.

Mr. Smith’s small firm was swamped with orders; at instances, the Prophet-5 had a two-year backlog.

However Mr. Smith’s improvements went a lot additional. “After you have a microprocessor in an instrument, you understand how straightforward it’s to speak digitally to a different instrument with a microprocessor,” Mr. Smith defined in 2014. Different keyboard producers began to include microprocessors, however every firm used a unique, incompatible interface, a scenario Mr. Smith stated he thought-about “form of dumb.”

In 1981, Mr. Smith and Chet Wooden, a Sequential Circuits engineer, introduced a paper on the Audio Engineering Society conference to suggest “The ‘USI’, or Common Synthesizer Interface.” The purpose, he recalled in a 2014 interview with Waveshaper Media, was “This is an interface. It would not need to be this, however all of us actually need to get collectively and do one thing.” In any other case, he stated, “This market’s going nowhere.”

4 Japanese corporations — Roland, Korg, Yamaha, and Kawai — have been prepared to cooperate with Sequential Circuits on a shared customary, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Kakehashi of Roland labored out the main points of what would turn out to be MIDI. “If we had completed MIDI the same old means, getting an ordinary made takes years and years and years,” Mr. Smith informed the Pink Bull Music Academy. “You have got committees and paperwork and da-da-da. We bypassed all of that by simply principally doing it after which throwing it on the market.”