Are You Still Here?
What if you made an instrument and nobody played it? Thankfully, I can’t answer that question, but it would surely suck. I am not much of a musician. I am definitely not a keyboard player. Nonetheless, I have dedicated a significant portion of my life and probably too much of my mind to helping create musical instruments and tools, and most of the satisfaction I’ve derived from that is a result of hearing and seeing what musicians do with them. That excites me more than any music I might create. Contributing to a team that created musical instruments was my creative outlet.
I’m not going to attempt a list of well-known Prophet-6 players here. I’d surely leave someone out. And besides, having famous musicians play an instrument was never my goal. Seriously. It’s much more fun when someone who is maybe not so well known plays your instruments and rises to some level of recognition and success. It makes you feel a bit like the proud uncle (or aunt). Hardly a week goes by that I don’t see a Prophet-6 on TV or in a YouTube video or in a studio or onstage somewhere. There was a period of time where it felt like there was a Prophet-6 or a Rev2 or even both on Saturday Night Live about every other week.
I have owned many synthesizers over the years. If I was going to pare down the current batch, the Prophet-6 would certainly be a keeper, and not for purely sentimental reasons. It’s still the first synth I reach for when I want to do something quickly. The first poly synth, anyway. It’s so easy to get around on, it’s versatile, and it’s hard to make it sound bad. Like the synths that inspired it, it plays well with others, a trait that is too often overlooked and undervalued. That said, it’s hard not to feel sentimental, too. There are other synths I worked on that are more personal because they have more of me in them, but the Prophet-6 was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to design one that paid tribute to Sequential Circuits while adding directly to the legacy of those instruments. As always, thanks, Dave.
