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In January 1978, Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits emerged bleary-eyed from a workshop in San Francisco. He drove south to the NAMM show in Anaheim, where he would revolutionize the synthesizer landscape. In the boot of his car was the Prophet-5 synthesizer, a modest, 5-voice analog machine with two oscillators, a nice sounding filter and VCA per voice built into an understated front panel design and wooden enclosure. What made this synthesizer remarkable was its ability to store sounds.
At the time, many synth manufacturers were orbiting the gravitational pull of the perfect polysynth. Moog was entangled in the deep polyphony of the Polymoog, Yamaha had crafted the powerful but complex CS-80, ARP had two goes at the Omni polysynth, and Roland was preoccupied with their SH architecture. The potential of polyphonic synthesizers had wowed musicians but they were often either too expensive, too unwieldy, or too unreliable. Everyone was desperate to land a good, affordable, solid, recallable, and awesome-sounding polysynth, but it was Dave Smith and ex-Moog engineer John Bowen who were the first to pull it all together.
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It was probably Dave's unique position as a computing and aerospace engineer during the day and an analog synthesizer enthusiast on the weekends that gave him the ability to see how synths could evolve through the fusing of analog circuits with digital control systems. Solid State Music (SSM) started producing integrated circuit chips for common synthesizer parts like the VCO, VCF, and VCA. E-mu Systems made a keyboard with a Z80 microprocessor to digitally scan the keys to detect which notes had been played. This could be used to manage and allocate voices in a very efficient way. Dave fully expected Moog or ARP to be snapping up these chips with new synth designs, but nothing seemed to be happening, so he and John decided to flesh out their own polyphonic synthesizer that combined the simplicity of these chips with his own knowledge of microprocessors.
Dave reworked the microprocessor to scan the chips and store their state as programs. It was this programmability that set the synthesizer world alight. It also helped that the Prophet-5 sounded fantastic.
The Poly-Mod section was one innovation that made it sound a bit different. It was a set of modulation routing controls that worked per voice to route the filter envelope and Osc B pitch to the pitch and pulse width of Osc A and the filter cutoff. This produced lots of exciting pitch modulation and weird audio rate FM along with oscillator sync.
The Prophet-5 was the first in a series of Prophet synthesizers that could be defined by their merging of analog and digital technologies. Let's explore the other Prophets.
Prophet-10
The first attempt at the Prophet-10 saw Sequential take the Prophet-5 and simply build twice as many voice cards into the same chassis. This worked but had the tendency to overheat and put all the tuning out of whack. To alleviate the problem, Sequential made the bold move of doubling the size of the chassis to improve the airflow and keep everything together. Adding a second keyboard seems like a slightly mad decision, but one that worked well with the increased chassis size.
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However, it was still frustratingly unreliable, and the blame eventually fell on the instability of the SSM chips. So in 1980, with the Rev3, both Prophets moved to the new Curtis CEM chips, which were reported to handle temperatures much more smoothly.
The dual keyboards brought with them different ways of playing. You could play a single sound with all ten voices over the two keyboards or split them into two Prophet-5s with a different sound and 5-voices on each. You could double up on the oscillators to give you a 4-VCO 5-voice sound across both keyboards, or you could alternate patches for each note played.
Prophet Series
Around the Prophet-5/10 grew a number of other instruments and peripherals. The Pro One takes a single voice from the Prophet-5 and builds it out into a Minimoog-beating monosynth. It was cheap but sounded great using the same components (capitalizing on ordering in quantity), and featured a version of Poly-Mod and a 40-note sequencer.
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As a slight oddity, we have the Prophet Remote "keytar". This may have been inspired by the Moog Liberation, but the Remote didn't have any sounds of its own; it was purely a serial controller for the Prophet-5 tethered by a 20ft cable. It had a 4-octave keyboard, bank and program buttons, and mini mod wheels in the hand grip for controlling the pitch bend, LFO, and filter cutoff.
Perhaps less well-known is the modular effects unit that Sequential built for the Prophet synthesizers. The Pro-FX was a rack-mounted effects system consisting of the Model 500 System Controller and Model 501 Expansion Cage. It was fully programmable and could handle up to 30 effects modules. All the settings could be stored in program slots, and they could be recalled in sequence to change during playback.
Also often overlooked is the Poly-Sequencer. It was designed to work with the Prophet-5 and could be built into the Prophet-10 if you ordered it at the same time. The upgraded model could store 10,000 notes in any form over the five tracks. You could record in real time or in single steps from the keyboard and it would also remember program changes.
Prophet-600
The arrival of the Prophet-600 marks another event that was facilitated by Dave Smith's hybrid approach to synthesizer engineering. He'd been working on a communication protocol called the Universal Synthesizer Interface that allowed synthesizers to control each other. He shared this idea with Tom Oberheim of Oberheim Electronics and Roland’s Ikutaro Kakehashi, and at the 1983 NAMM show, their Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or MIDI, was unleashed upon the world.
The Prophet-600 was arguably the first synthesizer to have MIDI, but of course, MIDI is no good on its own, and at the launch, it was connected to the similarly MIDI-equipped Roland Jupiter-6 that was released around the same time.
It looks a lot like a simplified Prophet-5 and has similar architecture, but this time, it has six voices and the all-important MIDI. It has the Poly-Mod section, a simple sequencer, an arpeggiator, and program storage on a membrane-style keypad.
It took advantage of the improvements to chip manufacturing that brought prices down, and while it used the same VCO chips and a nicely fierce filter design, the envelope duties were digitized over to the Z80 microprocessor. The digital envelopes don't quite match the zip of the analog ones, so the feel of the Prophet-600 lacks a certain something that has bothered owners ever since.
Many Prophet-5s were retrofitted with MIDI, so the Prophet-600 didn't quite have the impact that they had hoped it would have. The Yamaha DX7 was also poised for release, so it wasn't long before everyone was moving on from analog synths to the new world of digital FM.
Prophet-T8
The synth that perhaps would have had a much larger impact was the Prophet-T8. Had it been released in 1981 as originally planned, it would have been the glorious successor to the Prophet-5/10, but development delays kept it back until 1983, when interest in huge analog synths was starting to wane.
The big story for the T8 was a polyphonic pressure-sensitive keyboard, which at the time was a revolutionary possibility. Sequential wanted to mirror the responsiveness of a piano, but this proved to be a very complex problem. Eventually, they got it right using optical sensors plugged into the Z80 processor to accurately measure the travel of a key and the duration it was held. Each note could be individually fine-tuned to the exact response the player requires. It's considered to be one of the finest synthesizer keyboards ever made and was later used by New England Digital on the Synclavier.
Other than expanding to eight voices, the T8 shares much of the same architecture as the Prophet-5. It has some improvements like keyboard tracking on the filter, a triangle waveform on the second oscillator, improved VCAs, more LFO control, and MIDI. And there were some extras like polyphonic glide, programmable volume, and digitized envelopes. However, it didn't suffer the same lag as the Prophet-600 thanks to the newer Z8000 processor used for the envelopes alongside the Z80 that handled the keyboard scanning. It also had a relatively simple sequencer which could store program changes and, for the first time, velocity.
All of the development time and use of materials in the keyboard meant that when it arrived, it was three times the price of the DX7. Despite being an extraordinary instrument, sales were poor, and apparently, only 350 were made.
Prophet-2000
By 1985, the electronic music landscape was rapidly changing. Affordable synthesizers such as the Yamaha DX7 were bringing futuristic digital sounds to the evolution of music, and everyone wanted to get into samplers. However, samplers like Fairlight, Synclavier, and Emulator were painfully expensive. The Ensoniq Mirage, released in 1984, was the first sampler to come in at under $2000 and sold by the bucket load. Sequential wanted to have a go at the growing sampler market but needed something to give them the edge, and they found a few.
At the time, all samplers were 8-bit (except for the unreachable Synclavier), so when the 12-bit Prophet 2000 arrived, its higher-quality sound caused quite a stir. It was much easier to use than the Mirage; all the parameters had labelled buttons on the front panel, and it used a decimal 3-digit display rather than the 2-digit hexadecimal one on the Ensoniq. Sequential made creating clickless loops points really easy by automatically jumping from zero crossing to zero crossing as you moved the loop position, which you could only normally do in software. They also had different loop points for sustain and release. The Prophet 2000 was the first MIDI instrument to be multi-timbral over all 16 MIDI channels and would dynamically allocate its 8 voices to whichever channel needed it.
The Prophet 2000 hung onto the Sequential hybrid methodology and had great-sounding analog filters and VCAs. They followed it up with the rack-mountable Prophet 2002 and were able to offer software editing via MIDI sample dumps. While it should have been a huge success on paper, the power of the larger brands like E-mu, Roland, and the upstart Akai, which offered larger displays, quickly caught up with similarly priced machines, and Sequential found themselves in some difficulty. They released a sophisticated 16-bit Prophet 3000 in 1987, but it wasn't enough to save them from going under. Sequential was bought out by Yamaha the same year.
Prophet VS
Before Sequential was taken down by, according to Dave Smith, their decision to move too soon into computer audio, they found the time to release one more massively influential synthesizer, the Prophet VS. The VS was the brainchild of Sequential engineer Chris Meyer, who was working on the Prophet-2000. While discussing the merits of crossfading digital waveforms with a colleague, he began to conceptualize what would happen if you scanned wavetables in two dimensions rather than just forward and back.
At the time, Dave Smith was looking for a good idea to base a digital synth upon, and Meyer was able to convince him that crossfading between four specified waveforms, through careful control of summing and harmonic content, could generate a range of very interesting and modulatable tones that no one had heard before. The waveforms were generated by four individually tuneable oscillators, visualized as being placed at the points of a diamond. Initially, modulation and envelopes were used to define a mix of waveforms until later in the development, when they came up with the joystick idea that really brought the sound alive and gave birth to Vector Synthesis.
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The Prophet VS launched into a market crowded with baffling digital synthesis methods that few people really understood how to program. Its stand-out feature was the ability to generate completely unique sounds simply by selecting four waveforms for the four vector points and using the joystick to find a sweet spot. However, it also had a few problems with tuning and the poor implementation of the velocity-sensitive keyboard. One issue was that the case would bow if it was placed on a stand rather than on its feet, and this would force the aftertouch to always be on, which played havoc with the modulation control.
It was a bold and unique synthesizer, but it wasn't enough to save Sequential Circuits, and they went out of business a year later. The Prophet VS design team ended up working on the Yamaha SY22 and SY35 vector synthesizers and the Korg Wavestation.
Resurrection
Dave Smith moved on to work for Yamaha, Korg, and Seer Systems and also ended up, amongst other things, developing the world's first software synthesizer, which was later licensed to Creative Labs for the AWE 64 soundcards.
In 2002 he came back to hardware instruments in the shape of Dave Smith Instruments (DSI). In 2015, in a goodwill gesture prompted by Roland's Ikutaro Kakehashi, Yamaha returned the Sequential Circuits brand name to him and in 2018 he rebranded simply as "Sequential". The synthesizer landscape had changed dramatically, and two decades of digital synths and software emulations had gotten people reminiscing about the good old days of analog and "real" synthesizers. Dave has always been keen to move forward and didn't want to simply recreate his back catalogue, yet what he did next paid more than enough homage to it.
Modern Prophets
Over the next 20 years, Dave pushed and pulsed through various iterations of the Prophet's soul. The first try was with the fabulous Prophet '08. It had all the hallmarks of a classic Prophet synthesizer but flirted with digitally controlled oscillators this time and added another filter. It firmly established DSI in a marketplace thirsty for elegant analog synthesizers.
Next came the Prophet 12, which consisted of two layers of six-voice synthesizers using fully digital oscillators with all sorts of waveform bending circuits for a huge palette of sounds. The filters were still analog, and the vast modulation possibilities made the Prophet 12 a versatile synth that took in AM, FM, cross modulation, sync, and even wavetable vibes.
Another instrument first introduced in this era was the Prophet-6. While clearly a massive homage to the Prophet-5 in looks and tone, Sequential saw it as more of a reimagining, because it had a few unique features like a 2-pole highpass filter, analog distortion, and digital effects. A curious knob called "Slop" dials in some randomness to reflect the instability of vintage analog that's been smoothed away by modern manufacturing.
In 2017, the Prophet '08 was superseded by the Prophet Rev2, which added waveshape modulation, better effects, a sub-oscillator, and a polyphonic sequencer. The Rev2 is generally regarded to be one of the best synthesizers Dave has ever designed. It maximizes the analog sound while retaining the versatility of digitally controlled oscillators.
Dave's hybrid fascination comes to a head in the Prophet X. An Immensely powerful machine that combines analog synthesis with a complete sample-based sound engine. It can be bi-timbral with eight stereo voices or run as a single instrument with sixteen voices, or if you don't mind sharing filters, then you can squeeze out thirty-two voices. Your sounds are based around two sample-based instruments pulling from 150GB of 8Dio sample library and two digital oscillators. The combination is then pumped through 4-pole stereo lowpass filters. It's an epic machine with a dual effects engine, poly step-sequencing, a versatile arpeggiator and a powerful modulation matrix.
A Few Modern Prophets
Prophet-5 and Prophet-10 Rev4
I can only imagine the weight of public interest that sat on Dave's shoulders, desperate for a reissue of the Prophet-5. It doesn't matter how clever you are with new technologies or reimaginings of the classics, people want the real thing, and that's something only Sequential could provide. And so, in 2020, over forty years since the original Prophet-5 appeared, Sequential released the Prophet-5 Rev4, and it's a beauty.
It has all the muscle of the original, all the authentic sound, vibe and legacy you could possibly want. It includes all the filter changes made through the three previous revisions, so you can enjoy the original SSM Dave Rossum-designed filters as well as the later Curtis-based ones. Like the Slop knob of the Prophet-6, the Prophet-5 has a Vintage knob that throws in slight fluctuations to keep things sounding just a bit wrong–if you want it to sound more authentic.
The Poly-Mod section is all there with some additional destinations along with a unison mode, variable detuning, glide, and chord memory. The keyboard now has velocity and aftertouch.
The Prophet-5 can be expanded to become a Prophet-10 in the same chassis with an optional voice expansion card that comes without the overheating and tuning issues. There are no plans to recreate the dual keyboard version, but you can buy a Prophet-10 with the card already fitted.
The existence of the Rev4 is a marvellous way to end the Prophet story.
Epilogue
Currently, the Prophet-5, Prophet-6, and Prophet Rev2 are the only Prophets still in production. The Sequential comeback has been hugely successful, and it was acquired by the audio company Focusrite in 2021, a year before Dave Smith passed away at the age of 72.
The impact of Sequential synthesizers has been huge, not just in the instruments themselves but also in the collective psyche of electronic musicians. The Prophet-5 somehow managed to remain a desirable synthesizer even while the synth world changed massively around it. Dave Smith is regarded with such warmth and is known as a humble, hard-working, and inspirational character who somehow represents how to do synthesizers right. And this is not just because of his legacy but because he was always innovating and pushing things forward.
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