![]() I needed something that was affordable, but still could do the job. His drum machine, the Linn Drum was too expensive. I knew that I had to own a drum machine because my favorite musician at the time, Howard Jones owned at least one. I went nuts! I learned so much about programming synths from that one keyboard. But I had my tape machine, which had an input on the back and with my Commodore, I could sequence music. I didn’t have a studio, I didn’t have a mixer. Now there were only six voices, which means that you could only play six notes at a time before it would steal notes, or cut off the sound, but it was something and it was a start. I could create whole compositions with one keyboard. But, there was this thing called a sequencer, which if you used it with a Commodore 64, you could “sequence” up to six tracks at a time. It was very unassuming, there was not a forest of knobs, just one knob which allowed you to go through a set of menus to tweak one parameter at a time. One of the keyboards they showed me was this cut down, smaller keyboard called a Six Trak. They said that they could show me a few different things. I went into the local music shop and I said that I wanted to trade in my Siel Cruise. I didn’t even know what Sequential Circuits was, and I certainly was not in a position to afford a Prophet 5, or a Jupiter 8, both pieces of equipment that I really wanted. ![]() It sounded hilariously awful, but he had loads of fun doing it. My fondest memories were of my tutor playing German folk songs and Christmas Carols on it. In a nutshell, it was like your first used car, it was a set of wheels, but nothing more. ![]() ![]() And, even though it was dirt cheap at the time, it sounded dirt cheap. You could not save sounds, you could not use a single cable to plug it into another keyboard/module to get it to make a sound. While this was technically a synthesizer, like every other analogue keyboard that was built before MIDI, you could do nothing with it. When I say proper synthesizer, I did beg, borrow and “save” enough money to buy a Siel Cruise. My First “Real Keyboard”ĭave Smith’s company, Sequential Circuits, built the first proper synthesizer I ever owned, the Sequential Circuits Six Trak. Dave Smith was a genius level inventor who changed my creative world and millions of others with his invention of MIDI. To me, there has been no more important technology that transformed my life than MIDI. Dave Smith: A Tribute to the Father of MIDI. ![]()
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