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  • It's one of my favourite stories and it changes - not so much my story

  • but by what has been happening recently, and what has been happening to the story recently

  • In 1981, I was invited to Japan

  • I met Mr Kakehashi and the engineer that designed the Jupiter 8

  • and Mr Kakehashi was very keen on creating a connection between one of our sequencers and the Jupiter 8.

  • He and an engineer called Mr Sakai had created this connection - it was a serial connection,

  • and they were referring it to it as a Universal Serial Bus

  • which these days I think is hilarious, because of USB,

  • but eventually changed it after some discussions.

  • They had discussion with Dave Smith from Sequential Circuits

  • and Tom Oberheim (Oberheim Keyboards).

  • The three gentlemen agreed on the possibility of starting a standard,

  • that every manufacturer would use and Taro (Kakehashi) was telling me this and I said to him at the time

  • are you sure you want to give part of our technology away to another company?

  • Taro (Kakehashi's) reasoning was that it was a small music business at the time

  • and it wasn't gonna grow unless everybody started working together

  • and nobody's really gonna make financial success if they didn't start working together.

  • For example Prophet had a sequencer inside their keyboard

  • Roland had sequencers outside their keyboard

  • but it was clearly going to be the case very soon that Prophet would have an external sequencer.

  • Now what if somebody bought the Prophet sequencer - and loved it

  • but didn't like the Prophet keyboard - they were stuck with it, so it made sense to create MIDI.

  • After those three gentlemen got together, Dave Smith announced at AES in 1982

  • that he wanted to create a system and everybody should get on board

  • and apparently they had huge arguments between everybody because Tom Oberheim

  • (for example) wanted a parallel bus so that it would be faster.

  • Somebody wanted a really, really heavy cable to connect and so on,

  • so the arguments just went on and on.

  • It wasn't until 1982 at NAMM, where Dave Smith got up and said 'Look - Ive got an idea

  • I'm going to call it the Universal Serial Interface'

  • 'Synthesizer Interface' I think - U.S.I.

  • at which time Roland were already releasing our USB

  • although at this stage it was called a Digital Control Bus - and so we already had this thing

  • but we couldn't get in agreement.

  • Dave, to his credit, went around to everybody again and said 'You have got to get on board' to Yamaha, Oberheim.

  • Kakehashi was involved in all this at that time and eventually it came down to that small group that did agree to it

  • Saying, we're the major players in a small market, if we do it, they will have to come along

  • It wasn't really ready, and then it was to be released at the 1983 NAMM Show for new products

  • and we were going to get together and say 'Here it is - this is MIDI'

  • but Mr Dave Smith released his in December, which I always thought was a little bit strange

  • and I mentioned that to Taro Kakehashi at one stage, 'What do you think about that? Wasn't the agreement for NAMM?'

  • Taro said 'History will tell', he is very laid back in that way,

  • that's the interesting thing, now it is coming out that way

  • if you look at Wiki (and of course you believe everything it says!)

  • For years it has been saying Dave Smith the founder or creator of MIDI, lately

  • it's been saying he announced the possibility of a serial interface after consultation with Mr Kakehashi and Tom Oberheim

  • Clearly things have changed and Dave Smith and Kakehashi got a Grammy for MIDI.

  • My personal connection, yes I met Mr Sakai who wrote the spec, but my favourite story about that time was

  • I was with Mr Kakehashi in Japan, in Hamamatsu, and he said

  • 'Let's go out for lunch' and we went to one of his favorite restaurants and suddenly

  • Dave Smith arrived at the restaurant, and I thought this is a bit weird

  • the whole lunch conversation was about the connector - what are we going to use for the connector.

  • For example, Tom Oberheim wanted to use a parallel interface, which meant a really big, huge, chunky plug and cable.

  • It also had huge grounding problems so you had noise going all the time.

  • I'm not sure what exact connector Dave Smith wanted, but it was two pin and had the same grounding problem

  • so then until Roland Japan came along and said 'We've got an idea, well use isolators so they are not actually connecting,

  • they're just seeing the digital signals that allowed more than one instrument to be connected'.

  • With everybody else's design it was going to be two only, because if you put another one in there, you would get ground loops and it was just untenable

  • So, we ended up with this MIDI plug, and the amount of complaints about MIDI

  • 'Oh its too slow' or 'Its serial, so if you play a chord every note is going to be later than the other one'.

  • or 'Your using that damn MIDI plug that the guitarist is going to kick out halfway through the note'

  • It's 30 years old now, and there is very little chance of changing it that much.

  • I think Mr K should be really proud!

It's one of my favourite stories and it changes - not so much my story

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