Sequential Prophet 10
“Five note polyphony is for wimps, let’s make it ten.”
“Oh shit, it’s overheated, let’s make it five again.”
Of course there’s no way that Prophet 5 inventor, Dave Smith and his then partner John Bowen would have said exactly those words, but it’s fun to imagine just what was said when the original Prophet was created.
Rick Wakeman tells a story of being sat by a hotel swimming pool in sunny L.A. after a Yes tour and when he was approached by someone asking what he thought of an idea and plans for a new instrument - a polyphonic Minimoog.
Rick says that this wasn’t an uncommon thing to happen and being the decent chap that he is, he took the time to look over the plans and gave his opinion.
“The flow of the instrument is wrong. Move that there and that there and it’ll be better. Also the name’s wrong - everything these days is to do with Swords and Sourcery... hmmmm... The Seer, that’s a much better name. Tell me when you’ve built it.”
Again, these weren’t exactly Rick’s words but they probably weren’t too far off.
According to Rick he didn’t think any more about it, partly because everyone and his dog was cooking up some hair-brained idea for a new synth on a daily basis, but then he got a massage saying “I’ve built it.”
It wasn’t called the Seer though, it was called the Prophet. it was also 10 voice polyphonic, called the Prophet 10 and less than ten of were ever built. Legend has it that Patrick Gleeson bought two but they were complete disasters. The main problem was the heat generated by the sheer amount of circuitry made the whole design unworkable and so they stripped out half the guts from the case, lost half the polyphony as a result and the Prophet 5 Rev 1 was born in 1977.
It lived up to expectations too. It really did sound something like a polyphonic Minimoog. It had proper patch memories and it looked gorgeous. The Prophet 5 story is very detailed and probably best told elsewhere, because our love of the dual manual Prophet 10 is what’s occupied us for several years now.
The Version 3 Prophet 10 didn’t come until 1980 and featured a dual manual and CEM Filter chips. It did everything the Prophet 5 did but it had double the polyphony (obviously) as well as a neat way of allocating 10 voices in a variety of modes including one where you effectively have a 20 oscillators assigned to a single note. This makes for a seriously massive monosynth but we freely admit it’s overkill and the standard mode of having two oscillators per voice is probably more sensible, particularly if you live near a fault line.
It also has a 10,200 event sequencer the contents of which can be stored onto a Braemer micro-cassette drive. It’s a fiddly process but it was a big step up from the previous Exatron wafer drives which could only store 2500 events and had a brilliant trick of destroying themselves when they jammed.
It’s fair to say that in terms of commercial success the Prophet 10 didn’t set the world on fire, if partly because the Prophet 5 had already done that. The estimated amount of Prophet 5’s produced was around 8000 and the figures for the Prophet 10 paled by comparison.
The world had moved on. We now demanded velocity sensitivity, after-touch and more memories, but nonetheless the dual manual Prophet 10 is once again testament to that early spirit of adventure when bigger was better and bolder, and some synthmakers weren’t afraid to take equally big risks.
If you’re looking for a secondhand Prophet 10 for a collection you’ll be hard pushed to find one and should expect you pay anything between £1500 to £4000 depending on condition.
If you’re looking for a secondhand Prophet 10 for gigging, you need psychiatric help.
