Session Transcript:
Dave Smith
Red Bull Music Academy, London 2002

The video stream for this lecture can be watched here.

Back in the late '70s, musician Roger Linn and engineer Dave Smith were catching the first droplets of the silicone tidal wave that was to come. The appearance of the Minimoog in 1971 switched on a light for both of them, and soon both were working on their own electronic projects. Soon Roger had invented the MPC and Dave turned MIDI into reality.
»All of Roger's Akai products are standard for hip hop«, nods Smith nonchalantly. »He has quite a legacy in the beat industry.«

Roger Linn: »I was a guitar player in late '70s L.A. and I was into computers. I was learning about all the technology while I was a songwriter and doing some record production and engineering. Computers were just starting to happen at the time.«

Dave Smith: »Apple started about four miles from where I was living, that's where things were happening in the late '70s, early '80s.«

Roger Linn: »They called it an Apple computer because it used to be a valley full of apple trees. Now it's a valley full of buildings.«

Dave Smith: »It started with semi-conductor manufacturers in the late '60s, early '70. Intel started in Santa Clara in the Silicon Valley, probably the first company in the area. So it just happened to become a semi-conductor area, which then became the computer area.

A lot of small companies in the area eventually became huge. There was a lot of aerospace, NASA has a big installation there, that's the original hi-tech there. I did time as a satellite engineer. Aerospace is no fun - don't go into it. Play music, design instruments - much more fun. It was silly, you could see all your taxpayer dollars going down the drain, buying toys for military people. The original hi-tech was aerospace industry and military driven. When I got out of college those were the only jobs around if you were a technically-oriented person. There was no consumer hi-tech arena at all. So that's where the roots came from and then fortunately it shifted to more interesting things. It didn't just happen overnight. I don't know that there's a specific reason why it happened there and not other places.«

Roger Linn: »Some people say it's an outgrowth of the hippie movement in northern California. There was a spirit of creativity. A lot of companies at the time had signs up that said things like ’Defy Authority’ and ’I think at Apple’, you can still write anything on your business card as long as it's not misleading. They allowed a great deal of freedom. It was probably the drugs. There was a spirit that didn't exist in other places. People looked at IBM in the same way that they look at Microsoft now, as a big evil empire where people had to wear white shirts and ties. At companies like Microsoft you didn't have to wear a tie and you could show up late to work. Microsoft rather became its own nemesis.«

Dave Smith: »I was working in the aerospace industry and a friend of mine told me that a local store had a synthesizer in it. I'd heard about synthesizers, it was a Minimoog. This was 1971. I went down there, looked at it and bought it. I was just playing in amateur bands as opposed to Roger who is a real musician, but to me the synthesizer was a perfect combination of my technical and music backgrounds. I bought it and started building things to go with it, then started selling them, and that's how my first company got started. Things have changed quite a bit since then. In fact Bob Moog is reissuing an updated Minimoog, called a Voyager.«

Roger Linn: »I was driving in my mum's car in the early '70s and on the radio there was an advertisement for a Minimoog, when I heard the sound I just flipped. My father was a professor of music at the University of Southern California, which had an emerging electronic music department. My dad arranged to show me the Moog 3P, a synthesizer with an oscillator and a filter and you could hear what the Moog voice sounded like. It was probably around $4,000 - certainly beyond my budget.«

Dave Smith: »I built sequencers initially. I built a big analogue synthesizer that had three rows of 16 knobs that you could plug into a Minimoog.«

Roger Linn: »Dave had a company called Sequential Circuits and made the first truly popular, microprocessor-controlled, analogue synthesizer polyphonic keyboard, which meant you could play four chords. It had a sound similar to a Minimoog but had a computer inside it. All the settings were organised into presets. They were the features necessary to bring the product to every star in the '80s and late '70s. It was called the Prophet 5, and it had marvellous sound. There were about 8.000 but they were in the 8.000 best players' hands. They started out making a sequencer called a Model 800, the first digital sequencer. Sequential Circuits went on to make many great keyboards and later when his company went out of business, he worked for Yamaha in Oregon. With his team at Korg he made the Wavestation, the technology that was used in subsequent keyboards, another real innovation. This gave a way to mix different sounds dynamically. And then after that you had Seer Systems, the first truly professional-quality software synthesizer. Oh, and he invented MIDI, I forgot about that.«

Dave Smith: »To say I invented MIDI is maybe overstating it but I was responsible for getting it done. Back in the early '80s computers were becoming more popular. All the companies had their own interfaces, so [at] Sequential, we had our own interface between our instruments - Roland and Yamaha would have theirs. But you couldn't connect a Roland product with a Sequential product. A few of us figured out that it was gonna take the industry nowhere, so I took the lead. I started by suggesting a universal synthesizer interface, then getting all the companies together to see if we could come to some sort of agreement because everybody understood the need for it.

Back then big stars would have numerous keyboards in stacks to look fancy. It was silly. But if you wanted to sequence your instrument, you could only use a sequencer made by the same company. We also knew that personal computers were starting to come out. We didn't know exactly how far they would go but we knew that they would be used as sequencers eventually.

So the first thing that they were used for was connecting one keyboard to the next, so you could play one keyboard but hear two or more at a time. But without being able to connect a Yamaha to a Sequential it was way too limited. It was obvious we needed to fix that. But a lot of companies didn't want to get involved. Some just didn't understand the principle of compromise for coming up with a common interface.

They all wanted it to be 25 bits and 300 MHz and big and do everything, some didn't want to do anything. We ended up just working with a few Japanese companies and went ahead and did it anyhow. So most of the design was actually done by Sequential and Raw. Yamaha and Korg were also involved but they didn't really understand what was going on. They just knew they had to be there.

The synthesizer industry was tiny, that's one of the reasons we were able to do this in the first place. And one of the reasons there's never been a MIDI 2.0. We knew that with something like MIDI the industry would grow and it did dramatically. It enabled a cottage industry to build up with small companies who had built little things for MIDI, and sequencer and software companies also came out of MIDI.

I heard about Roger in 1979 or '80. I kept hearing about this guy in L.A. who had this new drummachine. Before Roger's drummachine the only drummachines out there were these rhythm boxes that were not digital, did not sound like anything, like an organ.«

Roger Linn: »Before my machines there were home organ drum machines, that had a button that says 'Rock 1' and 'Rock 2' and 'Samba' and 'Tango' and 'Bossa Nova'. They had a volume and tempo control and a start button and that was pretty much it.«

Dave Smith: »Roger invented the first digital drummachine, the first machine that had swing in it, and all the concepts that are permanent fixtures since.«

Roger Linn: »The first one was $5.000 but it was the first one that had sample sounds and the first one you could really program on a practical basis.«

Dave Smith: »Things were expensive then. The first Prophet 5 was $4.600. There was a lot of stuff inside these things, expensive brand new parts. Before that Roger had played guitar in some successful bands, was touring a lot and had written a couple of hit songs that were recorded by Eric Clapton and other people. So he is more than just an equipment nerd. We both went belly up in the late '80s. Roger went onto design the MPC 60 and MPC 3000. He hadn't actually designed the follow-up's. They just ripped off his ideas. All his Akai products are now standards for hip hop and just about everything since. So he has quite a legacy in the beat industry.

The problem is that your business is only as good as your last product. You come out with a good product then the competition catches up and if your next instrument is not as good, then everything goes downhill. It's hard to keep sustained success.«

Roger Linn: »Running a business and writing a good contract are two different things. I wrote a pretty good contract explaining what I provide as ideas, so they are protected. But as far as running a business? I got great advice from the founder and chairman of Roland when my original company wasn't doing well. He said: "Fundamental rule of business - you must earn more money than you spend. Ha, ha, ha!"«

Dave Smith: »We're both having a good time now. We've come full circle after having our own big companies, then consulting for Japanese companies, then different things. We're both designing our own instruments again.«

Roger Linn: »We're very passionate about what we do. We would have invented these products even before getting paid for it. When I got my first rudimentary computer, which for $3.000 had a whopping 24K bytes of memory and cassette storage, all my friends said: "You're crazy, what does it do?" And I said: "Well, there are these blinking lights." I thought there was art in this box. My quest was to pull the art out of the box.

I wanted to be able to make real sounding drums. I like the idea of doing it all myself, overdubbing was so easy. I always appreciated the groove, a drummer who could play 'in the pocket' - very steady but with proper swing time. Finally people had this machine and it played a good drum groove and did it forever. They could experiment with the synthesizer part on top. It enabled people to work around the drum beat.

I showed one of my first machines to Brian Eno, it didn't sample but had sample sounds in it, the LM-1 drum computer. He said: "I'd like to have samples of trash cans and glass breaking for my drums." I'd sampled my own sounds to make these standard drum sounds because that's what everybody wanted. Then along comes Brian Eno, a real visionary. I was thinking of sampling different types of snare or bass drums, and he wanted me to put trash cans in.«