In fact, here’s a partial list of other things that wouldn’t have evolved the way they did without Dave Smith: MIDI (he thought it up), the Korg Wavestation, Sequential Circuits, and the very first soft synth that ever ran on a personal computer. You’d think that a guy with this kind of impact on an industry and a world of artists would be sitting on a mountaintop somewhere playing guru to generations of soundmakers. Well, he is in off in a glorious part of the world (Napa Valley), and he is a guru. But he’s sure not sitting still.
Mr. Smith Goes to Synthland
Dave realized when he was still in school that he wasn’t going to set the world on fire playing guitar in his band, so he gave up and got an engineering and computer science degree from U.C. Berkeley. This was in the late ’60s when engineers weren’t the techno gods they are now. He got a low-paying job doing what calls “real stupid work” for Lockheed in what we now call Silicon Valley.
One day in 1971 a friend phoned him and told him about this new invention called a Minimoog that he’d seen in an unlikely little shop in Santa Clara. “It was just a tiny store and I have no idea why they had the synth there because they shouldn’t have,” recalls Dave. “But they did and I bought it. It was a perfect combination of my musical background and my technical background. It was like, whoa!”
Bored by his day gig, Dave started to build stuff that made the Minimoog cooler. “I decided to build my own sequencer based on looking at pictures of the big Moog sequencers,” he says. “I wasn’t even sure how they worked. It was one of the classic three-row, 16-knob analog step sequencers. I played around with it and then I realized other people might want them, so I decided to sell them. I ended up selling four. That’s when Sequential Circuits started, in 1974.” Ah, so. Sequencers. Circuits.
The Very First Prophet
This is where things get really interesting. In the day of the Minimoog just about all synths were monophonic. Which means if you wanted to play a four-note chord you needed four synthesizers (and four hands), or a four-track tape recorder and lots of time. You can imagine what the thrill was like when, in early 1978, Dave introduced the Prophet-5, the first completely programmable polyphonic synth. Even though the Prophet-5 cost $4,595 — and people paid full retail then — everyone bought it just to get five marvelous voices under their grateful fingers. In fact, it’s shorter to list the artists who didn’t use it than those who did. It wasn’t long before other companies like Oberheim and Moog came out with their own versions of the polyphonic synth, but by that time the Prophet-5 occupied an iconic niche in the pantheon of modern music.
In the ensuing decade, Dave introduced a slew of variations on a theme: The Prophet-10 contained two Prophet 5’s and a 10,000-note sequencer in one big box — it even had two keyboards. Then came the Pro-One, which regressed to one voice but sported a sequencer and arpeggiator for a ridiculously low $645. It was no wonder the One outsold the Ten 10-to-1. Then in 1983, Dave introduced two synths that changed everything again: the Prophet 600, which was a six-voice synth with all the bells and whistles and that new-fangled MIDI thing for under two grand, and the T-8 which had a real wood piano keyboard with flying hammers and polyphonic aftertouch.
And the inventions kept coming: a MIDI-capable drum machine, a sampling drum machine, and an instrument that used vector synthesis, which pros still use today. In fact, Dave borrowed the vector synthesis technology when the Korg R&D division (which he created and helmed in 1989) developed the Korg Wavestation — the first affordable synth that offered sound production so complex and interesting that it was truly one-finger-soundtrack time.
The Gospel of Analog
Even though it was evident that Mr. Smith was the master of all the technologies he surveyed — digital and analog — it was in the world of analog that he reigned supreme. He’d never really gotten over the wonder of producing the special atavistic sounds that only analog can provide. “What analog is really good at is being imperfect,” he says. “It’s funny, as an analog designer, you spend most of your time trying to get rid of the bad parts of analog. You’re trying to keep it in line, close enough to stay in tune, and not too sloppy and not too noisy. Then you have to worry about crosstalk between circuits. So you spend all this time trying to clean it up.
“But when you’re designing a digital synthesizer, you spend all your time trying to muddy it up and dirty it up and make it more like analog, because analog has this natural slop to it. With analog, every time you hit a note, it’s going to be a little bit different. And the next note will be a tiny bit different from that. Not audibly, but when you play them all together, it really adds up to something that’s just more lifelike. It’s not a digital recreation. It’s the real thing. There are plenty of good-sounding digital synths and they have their own edge and their own special sound, but analog is just . . . different.”
The Passion of Analog
Most of the electronic instruments we play today use some form of digital manipulation of recorded waveforms. So even though they’re technically synthesizing sound, they start with a recording and use a computer to change that recording. Analog synths started with the simple building blocks of Electrical Engineering 101. In the beginning there were oscillators that generated waves: sine waves, square waves, sawtooth waves. Go to www.keyboardmag.com right now and you can hear what these simple sounds are like. They are sounds that don’t exist in nature, but are pretty elemental. Now, when we start to run these sounds through filters, things get listenable, and designers like Dave Smith wax rhapsodic.
“It really gets down to the analog filters,” he says. “They’re really the key. Oscillators, yeah, they contribute a lot to the sound, but the filters are probably the most important part. A filter is no different from the tone controls on your stereo. Think of it as a treble control; if you turn it up, you get more brightness. If you turn it down, you get less. That’s basically what a low pass filter does. When you turn it down, you get fewer high frequencies; when you turn it up, you get more. That’s all it is.”
Ah, but the devil is in the details; and there are loads of details. Early analog synths gave you fingers-on control of the envelopes that encased the sounds: the attack, decay, sustain, and release. You could dial in white noise and pink noise and bend your pitch with a voltage control attached to a lever or a wheel — which put the fear of God into a generation of lead guitar players and their precious whammy bars.
When is a synth more than a synth?
Naturally, analog designers complexified their inventions to create more and more fascinating sounds and wonderful ways of controlling the. But for Dave Smith the analog instrument was more than a matter of circuitry. It had its own unique personality. “It’s like a guitar,” he says. “You buy it one day and ten years later it has the same six strings and the same three knobs, and it works exactly the same way. You know all the intricacies. You know what sounds good, what doesn’t sound good. You know how to use it — it’s your axe. It’s a real instrument. I think sometimes synthesizer players have kind of gotten away from the instrument side — the musicality of having a real instrument in front of you.”
But don’t soft synths do the very same thing, just on a computer? “To me, a musical instrument should be something that you can hold,” says Dave. “You can play it, you can turn knobs. It’s a constrained design. It doesn’t get updated forever. You come back ten years from now and you turn this knob, it will do the same exact thing it did when you bought it, as opposed to a soft synth that you have to update every couple years, not only to add ten more layers of menus and features, but also because operating systems and computers change.”
In 1994, Dave, heading the team at Seer Systems, invented Reality, the world’s first professional soft synth. It was clearly a little too far ahead of its time, and in some ways, way behind it. “Our Reality system won’t run today because the operating systems have all changed,” he says. “So as a designer, you end up spending half your time porting the same design year after year to different plug-ins. What is it today, VST? AU? What? You’ve got to work with all this stuff and Mac and PC and this version and that version. It just gets silly. With soft synths you can keep going forever — let’s do this, let’s do that! There’s no argument that soft synths sound good. But I don’t think they sound quite as good — or play as well — as a real analog synth does.
“We see this at trade shows year after year. Someone who’s never played one of our synths comes up to us and says, ‘I’ve always heard about this but I haven’t had the chance to play it.’ And they play on it for about ten seconds and then look up and smile and say, ‘Oh, now I get it.’ It all becomes very clear what all the talk is about — what analog really means. What having an instrument with real knobs really means. It’s something special.”
The Musical Theory of Evolution
To understand what happened next, it’s important to understand that in Dave’s mind there’s no holy war between analog and digital synthesis. It’s like chocolate and vanilla — they’re both wonderful. Which explains why, in 2002, Dave drove his analog bus into the wonderful world of digital processing and came up with the next step in electronic music: the Evolver.
“The idea was not to just do an old-style analog synth,” explains Dave, “but to take it further with a lot of highly integrated digital circuitry. And so it has the best of both worlds. I found that a lot of things you couldn’t do (or shouldn’t do, digitally because they hurt your ears and were just big mistakes) did work when you ran them through analog filters because the filters tamed the sound. I do a lot of feedback stuff in the Evolvers — that’s one of the main features. And feedback is a whole lot of fun to play with.”
Keep in mind that this is not your grandfather’s shrieking feedback loop. One of the Evolver patches is just a tiny pinch of white noise in the loop that goes through a tuned digital delay and back into the analog filter and round and round. What might be termed a plucked string sound evolves into a huge, compelling creature of acoustic dimension that lurks in a stereo jungle. And the stereo spread is created not by a single digital black box, but by separate analog filters and delays and an independent feedback loop on each channel. There’s a built-in imperfection in the sound that Dave calls “slop” but you or I might call “organic” or even “awesome.”
Dave seems to be drawn to the unpredictability of sounds that will occasionally blow up, things that can hurt your ears in the digital domain. But pulling them back into the analog circuitry tames those beasts and makes them into wild but useable sounds. And what’s more, the sounds are never static – they shift and change and alter themselves – just like an instrument would in the real world.
What does a Prophet do for an encore?
About a year ago, Dave realized that he was coming up on the 30-year anniversary of the very first Prophet-5. The Evolver had matured so elegantly — and generated such an active global community of users — that he felt he’d like to spend a little time back with his analog roots. So many fans had come knocking, over the years, asking for an updated version of the original Prophet-5 that he decided it was time to go back to the drawing board.
First step: He got on his bike and began to imagine a 21st Century (but still all analog) version of the groundbreaking original. As he cycled through the vineyards of California’s wine country, he visualized the basic circuitry of his new re-invention. Each time he returned from a ride, he’d sit down at his computer and lay out schematics on a sophisticated virtual circuit board (see sidebar at left). In what amounts to a Rubik’s Cube of voltage, Dave could tease out all the vexing intricacies of crosstalk, glitchy proximity, and the dreaded FCC emission challenges. This is how one invents a synthesizer in the new world.
When he knew in his heart that he’d taken his schematics as far as computerly possible, he started on the layout design for the circuit boards that would be in the instrument. Once the layouts were done, he emailed them to a circuit board maker and in four days, Dave received the soul of his new machine: four little green boards with lots of silvery lines and little square doohickeys. To create a user interface, he popped the top off one of his Evolvers and plugged in a generic keyboard and presto! The Prophet ’08 was born. This might be a slight over-simplification, but in Dave’s words, “To locate a part for the design, you hop on the Internet and type in a few search parameters. You go to a site and find a part you think might work. You download the data sheets on it and then you know exactly how it works. Then you go to another site to see how much it costs and you do all of that. And you know immediately whether it’s the part you want or not. So the resources are just incredibly fast now, compared to 1978.”
The word on the ’08
If you liked the Prophet-5 — or even the idea of the Prophet-5 — you’re going to die for this instrument. “I thought it would be fun to go back, even though I said I’d never do something like this, and do a pure analog instrument where the audio chain is completely analog,” says the proud designer. “It still does quite a few different things that the original Prophets didn’t. Also, this one is going to be under $2,000, it’s got eight voices, and it’s quite a bit bigger sounding, but with the same basic filters and the same basic structure as the original.”
You’ll soon see a review of the Prophet ’08 in this magazine, but until you actually hear and play with this synth you probably won’t grok what your two grand will buy you. Which is this: The Prophet ’08 is a passport into another time and musical place. Like all the other Dave Smith instruments, it’s an instrument end-capped with real wood. And when you call up Dave Smith Instruments you get . . . Dave! And if a circuit board goes down you won’t spend two frustrating weeks emailing back and forth with tech support overseas. Dave will just mail you what needs to be fixed.
Of course, if he sells a million ’08s this will all change and you’ll wind up dealing with phone menus and over-worked nerds. But in the meantime, Dave is committed to doing it his way — the expeditious way. “What’s amazing is how efficient you can be when you do everything yourself,” he says. “I don’t have a marketing department, so I don’t have to listen to what’s supposed to be. If you think about how a normal company works, they have sales guys and marketing guys that say, ‘We need a product that does this!’ And then they have to go to engineers, and engineers don’t really know what they’re doing, except to say, ‘Okay, we need this many filters!’ And then they go out and try to do it and somebody says, ‘Well, it costs too much!’ Meetings, meetings, meetings, and time, time, time — it just takes forever to get something done that way.
“For me, I just sit down and make all these decisions on the fly. I can decide that only $2 more, I can add this great new feature by adding this one little piece of hardware. Or I can save $10 if I take this part out and do that other part in software. It’s just me talking to myself, basically, and I don’t have to answer to anybody else. So it just makes it incredibly fast to do.”
And yes, it will have full MIDI implementation. And yes, it will look handsomely retro like its forbearers. And yes, it will never go out of tune in the middle of a song — unless you want it to. But that’s beside the point. Dave Smith’s vision of musical pleasure is once again with us. And he’ll be proud that no matter how many instruments he sells, he’ll always be making an excellent Prophet.
