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 …Read More

The Home Stretch By the end of the 1980s, it felt like analog synthesizers were done. Over. At the time, the idea of anyone still playing a Sequential Circuits instrument decades later seemed almost ludicrous. But by the time Evolver appeared in 2002, that had changed. People valued vintage synthesizers less for their ability to …Read More

It’s Alive! I didn’t document the development timeline for the Prophet-6 at the time, but some of the milestones can be determined from web searches and the few files that I still have. After the development really got under way in October of 2014, my memory of what happened and when is spotty. That’s not …Read More

Let’s Get Real. Electronic, software, DSP, and mechanical design begin. …Read More

(Back) To the Drawing Board. Feature creep vs necessity? The first panel drawing isn’t even complete and I already want to add a major feature. …Read More

The Game Is Afoot. Design begins in earnest with the first attempt at a control panel layout. …Read More

Details, Details…. Having established a rough concept for the Prophet-6, it was time to start filling in the details. Dave surprised me, saying, “You know what it should be. You do it.” …Read More

Celebrating 10 Years of a Modern Workhorse: The Sequential Prophet-6. After receiving a 2013 Technical GRAMMY for MIDI, Dave Smith regained the Sequential trademarks from Yamaha, leading to the revival of the brand and a modern tribute to the classic instruments of Sequential Circuits, the Prophet-6. …Read More