Unlike a piano or organ, early synths, like the Moog and ARP, could only produce one note at a time. Shaping a particular tone involves setting multiple knobs, switches, or dials, and then trying to reproduce that tone means writing down all the settings and hoping for a similar result next time.
Prophet-5 by Mr Smith John Bowen And launched in 1978, to overcome these two shortcomings. Using a microprocessor to control the synth functions, it can play five notes simultaneously, allowing for harmony. (The company also makes a 10-note Prophet-10.) The Prophet also uses a microprocessor to store settings in memory, providing a reliable but personalized sound, and it’s portable enough to be used on stage.
Mr. Smith’s small company was inundated with orders; at times, Prophet-5 had a two-year backlog.
But Mr Smith’s innovation goes further. “Once you have a microprocessor in an instrument, you realize how easy it is to communicate digitally with another instrument with a microprocessor,” explained Mr Smith in 2014. Other keyboard makers started using microprocessors, but each company used a different, incompatible interface, a situation Mr Smith said he thought was “a bit silly”.
In 1981, Mr. Smith and sequential circuit engineer Chet Wood presented a paper at the Audio Engineering Society Congress, proposing “‘USI’, or Universal Synthesizer Interface.” This, he recalled in an article 2014 Waveshaper Media Interviewis “It’s an interface. It doesn’t have to be, but we really need to get together and do something.” Otherwise, he said, “this market is going nowhere.”
Four Japanese companies – Roland, Korg, Yamaha and Kawai – offered to work with Sequential Circuits on a shared standard, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Kakehashi of Roland worked out the details of MIDI. “If we were making MIDI the usual way, it would take years, years, years to develop a standard,” Mr Smith told the Red Bull Conservatory. “You have committees and documents, and da-da-da. We bypassed all of that and basically just did it and threw it out there.”
In 2013, Mr Smith told star of st helena: “We’re making it cost-effective so that companies can easily integrate it into their products. It’s free because we want everyone to be able to use it.”
