Requiem for a Prophet

I heard about Dave Smith's passing in early 2023, 6 months after his heart attack. You may not know who he was, but without him records from the late 1970s and early 1980s (and onwards) would have sounded very different.

Dave came up with the first synth you could play five notes at a time on, back when one-note monophonic synths were all we had. His company Sequential Circuits (later Sequential) made the Prophet 5 from 1978 until 1984, when everyone started using FM digital synthesizers instead. I played a Prophet 5 onstage, and loved how easy it was to come up with new sounds with its multiple knobs and switches. Even after using other synths in my keyboard stack, I went back to the Prophet’s always-fresh analog sounds.

On Dave's initial suggestion, he and a group of other major synth developers introduced the MIDI standard (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) in 1983 after a couple years of development. Sequential and Roland demonstrated it in 1983, synchronizing a Prophet 600 and Jupiter 6 at the NAMM show that year, and it spread to everyone’s instruments after that. When I worked for Sequential in 1985, I had my Prophet 5 retrofitted for MIDI, and used it plugged into a Yamaha DX-7. That let me layer analog and FM digital sounds together for something sonically richer than either analog or digital alone. Today, you hear synchronized synths, samplers and computer instruments all the time, but we wouldn't have such an easy time of it without MIDI.

With Dave's history of competing in the Iron Man in Hawaii back in the mid 80s, as well as biking in insanely difficult races to the High Sierras, everyone had expected him to live forever. When I started working at Sequential, Smith had just finished bicycling from one side of California's Sierra Nevada mountain range to the other. Depending on the route you ride, that can be almost 10,000 feet of elevation gain in around 170 miles - one way. We were all surprised by his heart attack.

After talking with former Sequential engineer Dave Sesnak about Dave Smith's death, I wanted to create an appreciation of Smith's work. The laudatory obituaries had all been written, so I composed and produced Requiem for a Prophet instead. It doesn't follow the prescription for a requiem mass. Instead, it's a celebration of the sounds of analog synthesizers and samplers, and the sonic possibilities MIDI made possible. I hope you like it.