Like its little brother though, by Rev 3, the Prophet 10 had switched over to CEM chips, which improved its reliability.Īs it transpired, Sequential Circuits was eventually bought by one of its fiercest rivals, Yamaha, in 1987 and subsequently shut down two years later. The synth also went large with the Prophet 10: essentially two Prophet 5s stacked on top of each other! While it sounds like a double-dose of a very good thing, Rev 1 of the Prophet 10 was plagued with overheating and detuning issues. You could assign different parameters to the mod wheel and send them to different sections of the signal path – for example, assign the LFO to the mod wheel and send it directly to the filter section. It also had intelligent and intuitive modulation capabilities. For a monosynth, it packed a deep feature set for crafting sounds, including two oscillators that covered sawtooth, triangle and squarewave between them. The Pro-One was a cut-down version of the Prophet 5, but quite successful. The Prophet name was applied to other synths produced by Sequential Circuits. See John Carpenter’s Prophet 5 (bottom right) Variations It had a reputation for sounding marginally thinner than the first two versions but it was also the most reliable. The biggest difference in this last version of the Prophet 5 was the use of Curtis Electric Music (CEM) chips instead of the Solid State Music chips in the first two versions. Then came the Rev 3, the most common of all the Prophet 5s, with over 5,000 in circulation. Despite the small numbers, it made enough of a splash to secure many preorders, which spurred Smith to secure more funding for the Rev 2, of which more than 1,000 were made.

They were all hand-assembled in these early days of the company. This first version of the Prophet 5 – Rev 1 – is incredibly rare these days as only 182 were made. A feature that we take for granted now, but groundbreaking at the time. With the Prophet-5, you could go wild with synth experiments and if you discovered gold, you could save it for later. In the ’70s, patch storage was a distant dream (unless you already had one of Sequential Circuits programmers). The headline feature had nothing to do with sound though. With two oscillators for each of its five voices, a white noise generator, analog filters, LFO and envelope, this was an incredibly luscious polysynth – capable of producing soaring leads, thick brassy pads and thumping bass lines. Smith’s prowess in microprocessors helped him to combine the best of digital and analog worlds.

Sequential max synthesizer