Dave Smith, the legendary founder of Sequential Circuits, and its reboot Sequential, as well as being instrumental in the development of MIDI has passed away at the age of 72. Smith leaves behind his wife Denise, and his children, Haley and Campbell.
Dave Smith has had a music industry career that aspiring engineers can only dream of. Born in San Francisco, California, Smith launched Sequential Circuits when he was only 24 years-old after earning degrees in both Computer Science and Electronic Engineering from UC Berkeley. In 1977, he would change music forever after creating the Prophet-5. It was the world’s first musical instrument to run on a microprocessor, as well as the first programmable polyphonic synth.
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Dave Smith
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In 1981, Smith began collaborating with Tom Oberheim and Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi on a computer language which would allow instruments from all makes to communicate with one another after presenting a paper outlining the concept of a Universal Synthesizer Interface (USI) to the Audio Engineering Society (AES). Two years later, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) was announced at the 1983 Winter NAMM show. Smith’s was dubbed “The Father Of MIDI” due to his enormous contribution to this groundbreaking technology.
Sequential Circuits was absorbed by Yamaha, and Smith lead the Research and Development Division of the Japanese concern called DSD, Inc, where he worked on physical modeling synthesis and software synthesizer concepts. In May 1989, he moved to Korg and launched their Research and Development facility in California, which went on to produce the innovative and successful Wavestation synthesizer.
From there, Smith went on to serve as President at Seer Systems and developed the world’s first software based synthesizer running on a PC. In 2002, Smith left Seer and founded Dave Smith Instruments to return to his roots. The company’s first product was the Prophet-6. Smith rebranded DSI to Sequential in 2018 after regaining the rights to the Sequential name from Yamaha.
Smith’s death comes not long after it was announced he was collaborating with his old friend Tom Oberheim on a brand-new synth, the Oberheim OB-X8. The collaboration was to be the second between the two synthesis pioneers, after 2016’s OB-6.
Smith received dozens of awards and accolades over his long tenure. In 2005, Smith was inducted into the Mix Foundation TECnology (Technical Excellence and Creativity) Hall of Fame for the MIDI specification and in 2013, he and Ikutaro Kakehashi – aka Mr. K from Roland – received a Technical Grammy for their contributions to the development of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) technology.
