The reason was once headaches from a center assault, stated his spouse, Denise. Mr. Smith, a resident of St. Helena, Calif., have been in Detroit to wait the Motion digital track competition.
The Prophet line of synthesizers, designed through Mr. Smith and John Bowen for Smith’s corporate Sequential Circuits within the past due Seventies and ’80s, have been the primary commercially advertised synthesizers that have been polyphonic — which means that musicians may play solidarity and entire chords. Each and every unit had programmable reminiscence that allowed the consumer to retailer and reuse sounds at any time.
During the Eighties, Mr. Smith’s analogue device changed into pervasive within the pop charts, gracing hit albums corresponding to “Mystery” (1982) through Michael Jackson, “Like a Virgin” (1984) through Madonna and “Abacab” (1981) through Genesis, in addition to Vangelis’s track for the movie “Blade Runner” (1982) and a number of other rankings through horror movie auteur John Wood worker.
A pc programmer and fledgling bass participant, Mr. Smith changed into serious about Wendy Carlos’s “Switched-On Bach” (1968), a success album of J.S. Bach items carried out on a Moog synthesizer.
“It was once simply so life like the way in which [Carlos] performed, was once simply, it appeared like an acoustic device,” Mr. Smith stated in 2014 at a Purple Bull Song Academy match. “Everyone knows what’s digital and what’s now not. It simply had this existence into it that was once simply wonderful to listen to and the way in which she performed it.”
For the reason that Moog fashions from that generation may play just one word at a time, it took Carlos just about 5 months to report her Bach album — one thing Mr. Smith found out when he purchased a Minimoog.
“The humorous factor was once, when the Minimoog first got here out, because it had a keyboard on it, numerous other people would pass as much as it, and the very first thing they’d do is play a chord, and just one word would play, and so they’d pass, ‘What’s happening? Is that this damaged?’ ” he defined.
Intent on fixing this drawback, he hand over his day process in 1974 and started paintings on a brand new line of synthesizers.
Within the early Eighties, with Roland Corp. engineer Ikutaro Kakehashi, Mr. Smith presented MIDI — Musical Tool Virtual Interface — the multichannel cables that allowed an interface between synth era from other producers.
Keyboard gamers, fast to grasp at the new era, ceaselessly seemed onstage surrounded through stacks of keyboards and sequencers that created a decadent array of sounds. Guitarists weren’t left in the back of, as MIDI-based guitar synthesizers quickly adopted. For his or her paintings on MIDI, Mr. Smith and Kakehashi shared a technical Grammy Award in 2013.
Within the Nineteen Nineties, Mr. Smith additionally constructed one of the crucial first software-based synthesizers that may be put in on a non-public pc, Fact, for the corporate Seer Programs.
David Joseph Smith was once born in San Francisco on April 2, 1950, and grew up across the Bay House. His father was once an English teacher, and his mom was once a homemaker and later an inner clothier.
He had a bachelor’s stage in pc science and electric engineering from College of California at Berkeley.
Along with his spouse of 33 years, of St. Helena, survivors come with two kids and 4 siblings.
Yamaha bought Sequential Circuits in 1987 and closed it in 1989. Mr. Smith later labored for Korg, the place he helped design the corporate’s Wavestation synthesizer, popularized through the band Depeche Mode. In 2002, he began a brand new corporate, Dave Smith Tools. The corporate was once rebranded Sequential in 2018 after Yamaha returned the logo title rights to Mr. Smith.
“My function in all my tools is that they have got a singular persona, nice sound and be a laugh to play,” Mr. Smith informed Keyboard mag in 2021. “That’s what all track is ready when you consider it, so the tools will have to replicate that.”
