I was getting into synthesizers and a friend of mine had a few. He owned a DSI Evolver. Just a fun little MIDI desktop synth. My friend lost one of the knobs or something and called the technical support 800 number in the manual. He was more than a little shocked that Dave himself was the one who picked up the phone. He said they had a nice conversation and Dave ended up shipping him a little baggy of knobs for free.
I love but really only tinker with sound. But my first webpages in the '90s had MIDI so I have fond memories of downloading file after file and creating catalogs of sci-fi and fantasy music for roleplaying stuff or webpages (sorry).
People who got into the internet after the mp3 revolution may not appreciate how awesome mods and MIDIs were, in a world where WAVs took forever to download over brittle 56K connections (and Realmedia never became mainstream in my country).
Edit: what I wanted to say that for me MIDI was Internet music, the markup language of sound and orchestra. Thank you!
One of my hobbies is loading some old MIDI file from the era into Logic Pro X and produce a finished track using all my synths. Results are surprising, some times I think "the guy who tracked this MIDI didn't know it could sound so well!"
One of the most influential folks in modern music. Instrumental in creating MIDI and polyphonic synths. The prophet line of synthesizers is still going strong today.
I briefly had use of a Sequential Circuits "Max", not only polyphonic
but polytimbral (it could kinda be 4 monosynths). Really ahead of its
time. RIP Dave, a great pioneer.
I have owned four DSI/Sequential Circuits synths in my life, his products were always amazing and ground-breaking.
A big inspiration both musically and technically. I hope Sequential finds their way going forward and keeps cranking out cool stuff with Dave's legacy :)
Dave Smith Instruments was generous enough to let a group from the San Francisco Electronic Music Meetup Group visit them in their San Francisco office.
It was cool to see where the magic was made, speak to the employees and play with all their fantastic toys.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31589839