Dave Smith, Whose Synthesizers Shaped Electronic Music, Dies at 72

Not like a piano or organ, early synthesizers, just like the Moog and ARP, might generate just one word 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 comparable outcomes the following time.

The Prophet-5, which Mr. Smith designed with John Bowen and launched in 1978, conquered each shortcomings. Controlling synthesizer features with microprocessors, it might play 5 notes without delay, permitting harmonies. (The corporate additionally made a 10-note Prophet-10.) The Prophet additionally used microprocessors to retailer settings in reminiscence, offering reliable but customized sounds, and it was transportable 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 simple 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 distinct, incompatible interface, a scenario Mr. Smith stated he thought of “sort of dumb.”

In 1981, Mr. Smith and Chet Wooden, a Sequential Circuits engineer, offered 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 “Right here’s an interface. It doesn’t should 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 keen to cooperate with Sequential Circuits on a shared customary, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Kakehashi of Roland labored out the small print of what would change into MIDI. “If we had achieved MIDI the same old manner, getting an ordinary made takes years and years and years,” Mr. Smith instructed Waveshaper. “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.”

In 2013, Mr. Smith instructed The St. Helena Star: “We made it low-cost in order that it was simple for corporations to combine into their merchandise. It was given away license free as a result of we wished everybody to make use of it.”