Happy birthday MIDI!

Aloha M, and congrats.
Hope you are happy in your new digs and if you are,
that you live there for at least another 34 years.

Re MIDI:
In the early 70’s I would stand on stage playing my guitar and imagine to myself;
Now the ‘A’ string is a trombone and
the high E’ string is a trumpet and
the ‘D’ string is an Alto etc etc etc etc.

Twenty years later in the early 90’s that dream became a reality
with the Roland GR50. I have since become a ‘MIDI guitarist.
I am proud of that fact. Thank you MIDI. (and Warren Sirota)
{’-'}

August 1983 !! WOW… :astonished:

So was the YAMAHA DX7 the very first synth to offer Midi spec ?? i don’t think the Synclavier, Prophet 5, or Roland Jupiter offered it ??

Thanks! Plan to stay in the new digs for 1 year than get a better place. As part of the whole shakeup ,I got some guitars I have professionally setup to possibly sell. I never had a guitar setup in a shop before. They did a great job and the playing is great ,but to the point ,I had my Casio midi guitar (real wood Strat) fixed and it tracking is now damned close to my Axon pickup.

Learned that my 62 Strat is now worth 20k

The Jupiter 6 and a later model of the prophet were pretty much the first, the DX7 came quickly thereafter.
The keyboard player in our band back then had a Prophet 5 series 1, it was amazing at the time, but had major problems with overheating, which pretty much screwed it for gigs. We actually got in communication with Dave Smith and had it sent down for repair, but it didn’t help much, I added a large heat sink to it but the problems persisted and he eventually got rid of it.
The DX7 was the first MIDI capable synth we got.

Exactly it was Fortran for an IBM 360 (probably all highschools were connected to the same system :wink: )
I didn’t keep the cards, just the tape which was generated from the cards.
Later in college I worked on a Univac with these huge web-frame core memories.
Late in the '70,s - early 80’s I built a 6503 based microcomputer to control my Modular Synth interface. Exactly the same microcontroller that Larry Fast used on “Computer Experiments Vol.1”. Didn’t have MIDI though, but I’ve still got it and use it - still have to program it in hex machine code and save and load the programs on cassette tape :laughing:

Safe to say that MIDI opened the door up to a lot of would-be composers, myself included, I am sure it changed many lives for the better (and initiated GAS in many others).

My first MIDI synth was the Korg Poly61m (descendant of the Poly6). I purchased a Poly 61 (no midi) in 1982, and then when the M was released, I switched over to that. You needed a midi filter box as it received only in OMNI mode! Next was the Prophet 2000.

Those were the good old days in some respects, my studio partner back then purchased a ton of midi modules, we had 4 Yamaha DMP7 mixers cascaded together, every parameter was automatable by MIDI, and more keyboards than we had room for.

Now its all in one little box. (Thank you Steinberg for VST). But I still have some outboard gear speaklng MIDI.

Happy Birthday indeed.

Thanks BriHar,

Yes, thats what i kind of thought. i don’t ever remember hearing of any DX7 owners complaining about unreliability with its onboard Midi spec.

Paul

My first midi synth was the Korg Mono Poly ,great sounding unit. My main 61 key synth today is the Prophet 2000 . I hung onto it even though its not used much apart from its range. Not sure if its survived the move as I think I heard parts rattling from the disk drive

http://www.winecountrysequential.com/page9.html

I remember the one internal sound of the 2000 - did a tune with that as it was kinda unique… cool you still have one that may work… 12 bit samplers had their own character, for sure. We had 3 of them in the studio in the late 80’s, two with the 8 out expansions and increased RAM. However, a Roland S-550 replaced mine, that was a cool sampler, SCSI disk, external monitor and mouse…

Yeah it’s been ultra reliable all these years. I had to get a replacement floppy drive 15 years ago from Wine Country btw. It’s internal sounds aren’t much to speak of at all, surprised you found one!

Indeed, they were horrible, but there was one when you added a bit of chorus, worked well for my ears. We actually sequenced tunes with the Prophet 2000 using a Roland MSQ700, cassette interface and all! :laughing: The Mac Plus and MOTU performer came shortly thereafter - no hard disk in the beginning! Look at us now! :sunglasses:

I remember circa ‘96 i configured the live rig for the two ‘keyboard players’ whom i was playing with at the time…
At that time i would program all the parts on the Trinitys’ sequencer then transfer them along with a bunch of sysex to a Yamaha MDF2 data filer which we used to sequence the parts live… it worked surprisingly well with no problems at all…usually after filtering out a certain amount of control data causing buffer clogs lol…

We ran a Trinity plus, 01W/fd, M1, Yamaha SY77 and EMU Orbit and Vintage keys with an Alesis SR16 sending a click to the drummer via cans… i do kinda miss those days though… :nerd:

Part two…

I meant to dig this up sooner, its a long watch, but interesting…