11 ms·

Remembering Dave Smith, 1950–2022

253 points by throw_m239339 4y ago

jdkee 4y ago
So sad. He was so young. Dave’s synths, along with those from Tom Oberheim, had an enormous impact on music in the 70s and 80s.
- boffinAudio 4y ago
  72 is young?
  - domepro 4y ago
    in this day and age yes, 72 is young.
    - boffinAudio 4y ago
      Ridiculous. Whats old? 130?
      - eweise 4y ago
        Yes 130 is old.
throw_m239339 4y ago
A tragic news for analogue synth lovers, Dave Smith was the creator of the first digitally controlled analogue polyphonic synthesizer (The Prophet 5) in the 70's, and the co-author of the MIDI spec in the 80's (with Roland I believe). to this day, the MIDI spec is still implemented in most commercial synthesizers and it's an innovation that allowed communication between musical devices. 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.
- s1mon 4y ago
  As much as his synths are great and have had a huge impact, the impact of MIDI is hard to overstate. It changed the way music was written, recorded and performed by giving a common electronic format for playing notes, changing timbres, synchronizing rhythms, etc. 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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI
  - tgv 4y ago
    Only yesterday, I saw a video of someone playing a huge pipe organ from a laptop via MIDI. And it worked. Despite its shortcomings, it's an amazing communication model. Quite the legacy.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      Beloved by keyboard players. Not quite so much by performers who generally perform on other instrument designs. MIDI is excellent at representing the performance characteristics of a keyboard, but you really have to warp it quite a bit to represent performance on stringed or wind instruments.
      - tgv 4y ago
        True. That's one of the shortcomings I alluded too, but still it's possible to achieve fairly reasonable sound with MIDI of percussion, guitar, and even violin performance. I think the main reason other performers like it a lot less is that there's no way to digitally capture of their performance parameters. E.g., there are some guitar pickups with MIDI out, but that can't capture the techniques, even though MIDI could represent it (albeit in a non-standard fashion).
thewebcount 4y ago
This is such a bummer! He seemed like a genuine guy who had a lot of cool ideas and wanted to share them with the world. He really helped change music in a serious way in the late 70s and into the 80s. Everyone remembers the Prophet 5, but even later synths like the Prophet VS had some really cool ideas. The envelopes on that thing were nuts! He will be missed.
ajxs 4y ago
The impact of Dave Smith's body of work stretches far outside the field of synthesiser engineering. His contributions have gone on to shape the entire history of modern music. Rest In Peace!
SN76477 4y ago
What a loss to the community, Dave was always filled with so much enthusiasm for synthesizers and what was possible.
tbatchelli 4y ago
Dave Smith popularized the polyphonic analog synthesizer in the 70’s and 80’s with the Prophet V, pioneering the use of integrated circuits to make synths. The company he built was called Sequential Circuits for a reason. A Bay Area pioneer. 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.
- dietrichepp 4y ago
  Another explanation that I've heard is that R&D for synthesizers in the 1980s and 1990s got brutally expensive, and a lot of companies just didn't make the transition.
  - jdkee 4y ago
    Building synthesizers out of discrete components was simply far more expensive than using digital technology to create and modulate various sound waveforms. The Yamaha DX was far cheaper to manufacture than the polyphonics Prophet 5, Oberheim OB-Xa, or monophonic Minimoog. The DX was lighter and more reliable, produced a wide array of sounds, and was easier to keep in tune despite being more difficult to program for useful sounds. Many DX users used the stock sound patches except for Brian Eno and a handful of others who could dive into FM synthesis. See https://hub.yamaha.com/keyboards/synthesizers/discovering-digital-fm-john-chowning-remembers/ https://hub.yamaha.com/keyboards/synthesizers/discovering-di...
    - dietrichepp 4y ago
      I don't think that's really an accurate account. 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.
dietrichepp 4y ago
Dave Smith was also behind the Korg Wavestation (released in 1990), which is an evolution of the Prophet VS. 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-tips-techniques 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tbossanova 4y ago
  Interesting, because one of my pet peeves from going to early 90s gigs was hearing those tinny (to my ears) approximations of acoustic pianos etc. I would have much rather had a freaky synth sound than that! Of course later on, people started using the overly-clean fake piano sound to artistic effect, so I eventually came around to liking it in context.
Pr0ject217 4y ago
Incredibly sad...
gwbas1c 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Smith_%28engineer%29?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Smith_%28engineer%29?wpro... (The linked page is light on details)
xbar 4y ago
I am very sad. I was looking for any happy Prophet news today, and this is what I found. Thank you for all your creations, Dave. And thank you for keeping them affordable, given their tremendous design complexity and musical capabilities.
- ushakov 4y ago
  Prophets are not exactly affordable…
  - bzzzt 4y ago
    Compared to what? If you're serious about making music and really want a Prophet 2000-3000 euro's should be within reach of most middle-class people. (certainly if they are willing to trade in some other expense)
threeseed 4y ago
And just days after the launch of the OB-X8. Collaboration with Tom Oberheim another legend of the synth world.
iostream24 4y ago
Oh! RIP. I still wish I’d never sold that evolver.
te_chris 4y ago
I love my Prophet 6 so much. RIP to someone who left a massive impact. Thanks Dave!
rumori 4y ago
Had a chance to visit the Sequential office in San Francisco during my 2015 visit there. I came prepared with a bottle of quality Tequila, met Dave and his team and had a great time chatting. I’ve been inspired by his work and overall kindness and he and Roger Linn, Dave Rossum, Don Buhla, Tom Oberheim and Bob Moog will always be role models we can aspire to shape our own lives after. Music technology is a fantastic place to be an engineer in, it’s as much as engineering as is being a creative artist. I felt these guys have been always on the forefront on making it a community experience and inspiring a wide range of artists. Dave will be sorely missed.
- s1mon 4y ago
  I had the pleasure of working with Tom Oberheim and Roger Linn, and can corroborate. I wish I had the opportunities to work with the rest of that list. 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.
  - rumori 4y ago
    Sounds like you are already there. I’m a big fan of Roger Linn as well and have the MPC3000 as my centerpiece. From time to time I do beta testing for eurorack companies, and you cannot imagine how many times I refer to the MPC as being the gold standard for sequencing features, it’s so well thought out. Did you work on the Linnstrument? There’s so much potential still in improving hardware sequencing, I cannot wait to see what he will come up with in his rumored project.
IAmPym 4y ago
I’m sorry don’t have the emotional energy to comment in depth or correct some of the misconceptions about analog synths or the electronic music world or any of that right now. Tried for a bit but having trouble focusing 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
- Rezwoodly 4y ago
  Hi Pym. First of all my deepest condolences to all of you in the sequential family. Reading the news this morning and I was truly left stunned. Dave was taken from us way way way to early. He was a true ledgend and genius, and will be greatly missed. He seemed like such a wonderful man. I recently mentioned to a brother of mine that Dave was my hero, and he still is, and forever will be. I shed tears on more than one occasion today reading comments and stories pouring in from those who were lucky enough to have met him. Linked is a photo of my setup, sans a poly evolver which will soon join. I've also owned a tempest and mono evolver. These instruments mean everything to me, they are not just mere physical and material objects. They are harbingers of that which cannot be put in to words. I have been meaning to write an email to Dave and all of you on the team THANKING YOU for the awesome, amazing and inspiring instruments you put out on a consistent basis. They have enriched the lives of so many people, no least my own, and for that I am eternally grateful. 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 https://imgur.com/a/rUQYCjf https://imgur.com/a/rUQYCjf
- abruzzi 4y ago
  its good to see you here--I've read your posts on other music forums. Many of us who work in tech, play in electronic music. While I know the P5 and being part of the analog renaissance are what most will remember him for, to me his most important contribution is the work he did on MIDI as the universal language of synthesizer control. I also highly appreciate that while the DSI synths never had a polyAT keyboard, most, if not all of them would still respond properly, so a Kurzweil midiboard driving a Prophet 12 module was one of the greatest performance instruments out there (not being an analog snob, the P12 was, to me, Dave's greatest instrument.)
jdkee 4y ago
Roger Linn's tribute to his friend Dave. See https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/more/dave-smith https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/more/dave-smith
musicale 4y ago
Oh no..... how terrible. Well I am going to go home to play my DSI/Sequential instruments ... over MIDI !! Thanks Dave for the beautiful instruments and for transforming the musical world.

253 points by throw_m239339 4y ago

So sad. He was so young. Dave’s synths, along with those from Tom Oberheim, had an enormous impact on music in the 70s and 80s.

boffinAudio 4y ago
72 is young?
- domepro 4y ago
  in this day and age yes, 72 is young.
  - boffinAudio 4y ago
    Ridiculous. Whats old? 130?
    - eweise 4y ago
      Yes 130 is old.

throw_m239339 4y ago

A tragic news for analogue synth lovers, Dave Smith was the creator of the first digitally controlled analogue polyphonic synthesizer (The Prophet 5) in the 70's, and the co-author of the MIDI spec in the 80's (with Roland I believe). to this day, the MIDI spec is still implemented in most commercial synthesizers and it's an innovation that allowed communication between musical devices. 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.

s1mon 4y ago
As much as his synths are great and have had a huge impact, the impact of MIDI is hard to overstate. It changed the way music was written, recorded and performed by giving a common electronic format for playing notes, changing timbres, synchronizing rhythms, etc. 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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI
- tgv 4y ago
  Only yesterday, I saw a video of someone playing a huge pipe organ from a laptop via MIDI. And it worked. Despite its shortcomings, it's an amazing communication model. Quite the legacy.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    Beloved by keyboard players. Not quite so much by performers who generally perform on other instrument designs. MIDI is excellent at representing the performance characteristics of a keyboard, but you really have to warp it quite a bit to represent performance on stringed or wind instruments.
    - tgv 4y ago
      True. That's one of the shortcomings I alluded too, but still it's possible to achieve fairly reasonable sound with MIDI of percussion, guitar, and even violin performance. I think the main reason other performers like it a lot less is that there's no way to digitally capture of their performance parameters. E.g., there are some guitar pickups with MIDI out, but that can't capture the techniques, even though MIDI could represent it (albeit in a non-standard fashion).

thewebcount 4y ago

This is such a bummer! He seemed like a genuine guy who had a lot of cool ideas and wanted to share them with the world. He really helped change music in a serious way in the late 70s and into the 80s. Everyone remembers the Prophet 5, but even later synths like the Prophet VS had some really cool ideas. The envelopes on that thing were nuts! He will be missed.

ajxs 4y ago

The impact of Dave Smith's body of work stretches far outside the field of synthesiser engineering. His contributions have gone on to shape the entire history of modern music. Rest In Peace!

SN76477 4y ago

What a loss to the community, Dave was always filled with so much enthusiasm for synthesizers and what was possible.

tbatchelli 4y ago

Dave Smith popularized the polyphonic analog synthesizer in the 70’s and 80’s with the Prophet V, pioneering the use of integrated circuits to make synths. The company he built was called Sequential Circuits for a reason. A Bay Area pioneer. 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.

dietrichepp 4y ago
Another explanation that I've heard is that R&D for synthesizers in the 1980s and 1990s got brutally expensive, and a lot of companies just didn't make the transition.
- jdkee 4y ago
  Building synthesizers out of discrete components was simply far more expensive than using digital technology to create and modulate various sound waveforms. The Yamaha DX was far cheaper to manufacture than the polyphonics Prophet 5, Oberheim OB-Xa, or monophonic Minimoog. The DX was lighter and more reliable, produced a wide array of sounds, and was easier to keep in tune despite being more difficult to program for useful sounds. Many DX users used the stock sound patches except for Brian Eno and a handful of others who could dive into FM synthesis. See https://hub.yamaha.com/keyboards/synthesizers/discovering-digital-fm-john-chowning-remembers/ https://hub.yamaha.com/keyboards/synthesizers/discovering-di...
  - dietrichepp 4y ago
    I don't think that's really an accurate account. 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.

dietrichepp 4y ago

Dave Smith was also behind the Korg Wavestation (released in 1990), which is an evolution of the Prophet VS. 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-tips-techniques 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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tbossanova 4y ago
Interesting, because one of my pet peeves from going to early 90s gigs was hearing those tinny (to my ears) approximations of acoustic pianos etc. I would have much rather had a freaky synth sound than that! Of course later on, people started using the overly-clean fake piano sound to artistic effect, so I eventually came around to liking it in context.

Pr0ject217 4y ago

Incredibly sad...

gwbas1c 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Smith_%28engineer%29?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Smith_%28engineer%29?wpro... (The linked page is light on details)

xbar 4y ago

I am very sad. I was looking for any happy Prophet news today, and this is what I found. Thank you for all your creations, Dave. And thank you for keeping them affordable, given their tremendous design complexity and musical capabilities.

ushakov 4y ago
Prophets are not exactly affordable…
- bzzzt 4y ago
  Compared to what? If you're serious about making music and really want a Prophet 2000-3000 euro's should be within reach of most middle-class people. (certainly if they are willing to trade in some other expense)

threeseed 4y ago

And just days after the launch of the OB-X8. Collaboration with Tom Oberheim another legend of the synth world.

iostream24 4y ago

Oh! RIP. I still wish I’d never sold that evolver.

te_chris 4y ago

I love my Prophet 6 so much. RIP to someone who left a massive impact. Thanks Dave!

rumori 4y ago

Had a chance to visit the Sequential office in San Francisco during my 2015 visit there. I came prepared with a bottle of quality Tequila, met Dave and his team and had a great time chatting. I’ve been inspired by his work and overall kindness and he and Roger Linn, Dave Rossum, Don Buhla, Tom Oberheim and Bob Moog will always be role models we can aspire to shape our own lives after. Music technology is a fantastic place to be an engineer in, it’s as much as engineering as is being a creative artist. I felt these guys have been always on the forefront on making it a community experience and inspiring a wide range of artists. Dave will be sorely missed.

s1mon 4y ago
I had the pleasure of working with Tom Oberheim and Roger Linn, and can corroborate. I wish I had the opportunities to work with the rest of that list. 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.
- rumori 4y ago
  Sounds like you are already there. I’m a big fan of Roger Linn as well and have the MPC3000 as my centerpiece. From time to time I do beta testing for eurorack companies, and you cannot imagine how many times I refer to the MPC as being the gold standard for sequencing features, it’s so well thought out. Did you work on the Linnstrument? There’s so much potential still in improving hardware sequencing, I cannot wait to see what he will come up with in his rumored project.

IAmPym 4y ago

I’m sorry don’t have the emotional energy to comment in depth or correct some of the misconceptions about analog synths or the electronic music world or any of that right now. Tried for a bit but having trouble focusing 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

Rezwoodly 4y ago
Hi Pym. First of all my deepest condolences to all of you in the sequential family. Reading the news this morning and I was truly left stunned. Dave was taken from us way way way to early. He was a true ledgend and genius, and will be greatly missed. He seemed like such a wonderful man. I recently mentioned to a brother of mine that Dave was my hero, and he still is, and forever will be. I shed tears on more than one occasion today reading comments and stories pouring in from those who were lucky enough to have met him. Linked is a photo of my setup, sans a poly evolver which will soon join. I've also owned a tempest and mono evolver. These instruments mean everything to me, they are not just mere physical and material objects. They are harbingers of that which cannot be put in to words. I have been meaning to write an email to Dave and all of you on the team THANKING YOU for the awesome, amazing and inspiring instruments you put out on a consistent basis. They have enriched the lives of so many people, no least my own, and for that I am eternally grateful. 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 https://imgur.com/a/rUQYCjf https://imgur.com/a/rUQYCjf
abruzzi 4y ago
its good to see you here--I've read your posts on other music forums. Many of us who work in tech, play in electronic music. While I know the P5 and being part of the analog renaissance are what most will remember him for, to me his most important contribution is the work he did on MIDI as the universal language of synthesizer control. I also highly appreciate that while the DSI synths never had a polyAT keyboard, most, if not all of them would still respond properly, so a Kurzweil midiboard driving a Prophet 12 module was one of the greatest performance instruments out there (not being an analog snob, the P12 was, to me, Dave's greatest instrument.)

jdkee 4y ago

Roger Linn's tribute to his friend Dave. See https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/more/dave-smith https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/more/dave-smith

musicale 4y ago

Oh no..... how terrible. Well I am going to go home to play my DSI/Sequential instruments ... over MIDI !! Thanks Dave for the beautiful instruments and for transforming the musical world.