Meeting with Dave Smith

A couple of days ago I had the great honor to meet with Dave Smith of Dave Smith’s Instruments. Dave is perhaps most famous for being one of the two inventors of the MIDI protocol, but for the last 30 years he has also been busy designing some of the most interesting synthesizers around.

image001His latest creation is the Prophet 12, a massive 12 voice synthesizer with 4 oscillators and a sub-oscillator per voice.

They are still hard to come by as the production has just started and they are all built here in San Francisco.

I had the great luck to be able to pick one up at Robotspeak at Haight Street, and through a series of lucky events Dave agreed to sign it for me.

So, with the synth still in its box I headed down to Dave’s office, where he kindly signed it and agreed to pose for some photos :)

I am now the happy owner of a signed Prophet 12, and yes the signature of course adds that extra ‘warmth’ and magic to the sound! ;-)

New Song (Fahrbahn 12 Kahlkoepfig)

This track is kind of a give-up for me. I’ve been struggling for many nights with getting the right type of melody going but it just refuses to fall into place. So, I’ve decided that this track is finished as is…

Some interesting things going on here is that the sounds you hear are a mix of sequenced hardware (DSI Tetr4 and the Meeblip) playing different arpeggiated melodies, and Arturia’s software emulation of the Minimoog.

I have sampled and worked with loops from my hardware synths in the past, but this is the first time they are allowed to stay ‘alive’ throughout the track. (Yes manually setting up the patches every time I worked on the track was a hassle…)

I wanted to keep the track simple, but still interesting. Might have ended up a bit too simple overall, but this track is what it is :).

Thanks for listening!