| Dave Smith (engineer) |
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HISTORY Dave has Masters degrees in both Computer Science and Electronic Engineering from UC Berkeley . Dave founded Sequential Circuits , the premier manufacturer of professional music synthesizers, in the mid-70s. In 1977, he designed the Prophet 5 , the world's first microprocessor-based musical instrument. This revolutionary product was the world's first polyphonic and programmable synth, and set the standard for all synth designs that have followed. The Prophet instruments played a major part in the recordings of all popular music styles, and are still prized by musicians today. In 1981 Smith started developing the idea of MIDI . In 1987 he was named a Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) for his continuing work in the area of music synthesis. After Sequential, Dave was President of DSD, Inc, a Research and Development Division of Yamaha , where he worked on physical modeling synthesis and software Synthesizer concepts. In May of 1989 he started the Korg R&D group in California, which went on to produce the professional musician favorite Wavestation products and other technology. He then took over as President at Seer Systems and developed the world's first software based Synthesizer running on a PC . This synth, commissioned by Intel , was demonstrated by Andy Grove in a Comdex keynote speech in 1994. Over 10 million of his second-generation software synth have been sold, which was licensed to Creative Labs in 1996, and is responsible for 32 of the 64 voices in the AWE 64 line of Sound Cards. The third generation is the world's first fully professional software Synthesizer , Reality, released in 1997. Dave was both the lead engineer on the Reality professional software synthesizer, and wrote all the low-level optimized floating point synthesis code. Not only did the full-featured synthesizer received a 1998 Editors' Choice Award, but Reality has earned the highest rating for a synthesizer or software application in the history of Electronic Musician Magazine's five-point rating system. Currently Dave is designing hardware instruments again with the Evolver , Poly Evolver , and forthcoming Prophet '08 synthesizers from his new company, Dave Smith Instruments. He is currently collaborating with Roger Linn (largely regarded as the inventor of the Drum Machine ) to release a new drum machine called the BoomChick via Dave Smith Instruments in 2008. SEQUENTIAL CIRCUITS PRODUCTS
The Prophet 5 was Dave Smith's first commercialized product and was first introduced by Sequential Circuits in 1978. The Prophet 5 was an analog synthesizer, and groundbreaking in that it was one of the first analog synthesizers to implement patch memory, a feature which scanned the settings of every parameter on the synthesizer and stored it into internal memory.
Sequential Circuits Prophet-10 Introduced in 1980, the Prophet-10 was essentially 2 Prophet-5s in one big (and heavy!) enclosure. There were two 5-octave keyboards, allowing the musician to play two different sounds at one time. It also included a polyphonic sequencer module, with its own tape backup module, and up to 10,000 note storage. With the sequencer option, it sold for $9,000, and less than 1,000 were made.
MIDI PLAYBACK EXAMPLES Doogie Houser MD Theme Song Super Mario Brothers AWARDS Dave Smith
Evolver Keyboard
Poly Evolver Keyboard
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