Dave Smith Wins NAMM 2015 Day One

With lots of new stuff hurtling out of the press booths at NAMM 2015 today, one has made every electronic musician collectively climax in a sloppy, sticky mess.

Dave Smith has announced the Sequential Prophet 6.

As if to totally compensate for Korg’s miserable launch last night, Dave (if I may call you by your first name, sir?) dropped this beauty on us and the synth world stopped, stared and reached for their wallets.

Enjoy…

“The Prophet-6 is a tribute to the original poly synth that started it all — the Sequential Prophet-5. But more importantly, it’s the culmination of our effort to built the most awesome-sounding, modern analog poly synth possible.”

— Dave Smith, Founder, Dave Smith Instruments and Sequential

Oscillators

Continuously variable wave shape (triangle, sawtooth, pulse, square) per oscillator
Pulse width per oscillator
Hard sync: oscillator 1 syncs to oscillator 2
Triangle sub-octave generator (oscillator 1) per voice
Low frequency mode (oscillator 2)
Keyboard tracking on/off (oscillator 2)
Oscillator slop amount for increased tuning instability, from subtle to extreme

Mixer

Oscillator 1 amount
Oscillator 1 sub-octave amount
Oscillator 2 amount
White noise amount

High-pass filter

2-pole, resonant, high-pass filter per voice
Bi-polar filter envelope amount
Velocity modulation of envelope amount
Keyboard tracking: off, half, full

low-pass filter

Four-pole, resonant, low-pass filter per voice, inspired by the original Prophet-5 filter
Filter can be driven into self-oscillation with the Resonance control
Bi-polar filter envelope amount
Velocity modulation of envelope amount
Keyboard tracking: off, half, full

poly mod

Sources: filter envelope (bi-polar) and oscillator 2 (bi-polar)
Destinations: oscillator 1 frequency, oscillator 1 shape, oscillator 1 pulse width, low-pass filter cutoff, high-pass filter cutoff

effects

Stereo analog distortion
Dual, 24-bit, 48 kHz digital effects, including: reverb (room, hall, plate, spring), delay (full bandwidth digital delay and emulated bucket brigade and tape delays), chorus, and phase shifter
Delay sync
True bypass maintains fully analog signal path when digital effects are off

sequencer

Polyphonic step sequencer with up to 64 steps and rests

patch memory

500 user and 500 factory programs in 10 banks of 100 programs each
Direct program access, including Prophet-5 style single-button access to the current set of 10 programs

performance controls

Full-sized, semi-weighted, 4-octave keyboard with velocity and aftertouch
Backlit pitch and mod wheels
Spring-loaded pitch wheel with selectable range per program (1 to 12 semitones up and down)
Transpose controls for an 8-octave range
Hold switch latches held notes on
Polyphonic glide (portamento)
Unison (monophonic) mode with configurable voice count, from one to all six voices, and key modes
Preset switch: when off, the front panel is live; what you see is what you hear