In a noble gesture that celebrates the rich heritage of music technology and, in the spirit of MIDI collaboration, Yamaha Corporation and President Takuya Nakaha have restored possession of the “Sequential” brand name to its original founder, the legendary designer Dave Smith.
With the encouragement of Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi, who is also a colleague and friend of Smith, Yamaha has restored the original name to Smith in the same spirit that compelled president Kakehashi to lead the cooperative effort of Roland, Korg, Yamaha, Kawai, and Dave Smith to develop the MIDI standard.
To celebrate this historic gesture, Dave Smith is consequently offering the world a brand-new, Sequential-branded synthesizer: the Prophet 6.
According to Smith, the new synthesizer is “vintage with a modern twist” offering a six-voice poly all-analog signal path, with discrete VCOs and filters.
With two newly designed discrete voltage-controlled oscillators and a sub-oscillator per voice, you can create continuously variable wave shapes (triangle, sawtooth, and variable width pulse). The filter section includes two discrete filters per voice: a four-pole, resonant, low-pass design inspired by the original Prophet 5-filter and a two-pole resonant, high-pass filter. A set of voltage-controlled amplifiers completes the signal chain.
Borrowing from its predecessor, the new synth also includes the renowned Poly Mod section with a bi-polar filter envelope and oscillator 2 modulation sources. The destinations have been expanded to include oscillator 1 frequency, oscillator 1 shape, oscillator 1 pulse width, low-pass filter cutoff, and high-pass filter cutoff. The Prophet 6 also includes unison mode with a configurable voice count of between one and six voices, as well as key modes.
You can work in either preset or live panel mode to speed up the creative process, and the dual digital 24-bit 48 kHz effects section includes studio-quality reverbs, delays (including standard and BBD), chorus, and phase shifter. True bypass maintains a full analog signal path. The synthesizer also features a 100% analog stereo distortion effect.
To take it over the top, Smith has included a multimode arpeggiator and a polyphonic step sequencer with up to 64 steps and up to six notes per step, plus rests with polyphonic keyboard input and external MIDI clock compatibility. The full-size, four-octave semi-weighted keyboard is both velocity and aftertouch sensitive to make the unit fully capable for both studio and stage applications.
You can learn about more new products from the 2015 NAMM Show at this link, courtesy of B&H.
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