Dave Smith, the Sequential founder and synthmaker known as the father of MIDI, has died, Sequential said. He was 72. Artists including Flying Lotus, Hot Chip, and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon paid tribute to Smith, whose inventions include the Prophet-5, used by a raft of 1980s greats, as well as by Radiohead for their diversion into electronics on Kid A.
Born in California, Smith founded Sequential in his mid-twenties, in 1974, and designed and released the Prophet-5 four years later. It was the world’s first fully programmable polyphonic synth, and the first instrument with an embedded microprocessor. In 1981, Smith and Sequential engineer Chet Wood designed a basic MIDI interface and consulted keyboard manufacturers including Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi, who had proposed the idea of a universal language for electronic instruments. Kakehashi and Smith unveiled the protocol that year, later receiving Technical Grammys for their work. Sequential launched the Prophet 600, one of the first MIDI synths, in 1983.
Yamaha acquired Sequential in 1987, and Smith went on to consult for various synth companies. He launched Dave Smith Instruments in 2002, which rebranded as Sequential in 2015 when Yamaha returned the company name. That year, they debuted the Prophet-6, an evolution of the earlier model.
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