Dave Smith Instruments -Prophet 6

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Sun Jan 25, 2015 9:15 am

vEddY wrote:BTW, in response to your comment about the loudness of guitar amps and living in an appartment... I had the same problem, so I get where you're coming from. And that's fine. But, there are solutions for that if you want to try.

Indeed! Speaker load boxes FTW.

http://www.thomann.de/intl/palmer_pdi_03l4.htm
http://www.thomann.de/intl/palmer_pga04.htm

vEddY · Post by **vEddY** » Sun Jan 25, 2015 10:43 am

True.

also:
http://www.thomann.de/de/jet_city_ampli ... _iso12.htm
http://www.thomann.de/de/randall_isolation_12c.htm

They work rather well for me. We could also take THD HotPlate and similar products into consideration.

Bertotti · Post by **Bertotti** » Sun Jan 25, 2015 7:53 pm

You know how I got away from the bothering the neighbors thing. I moved 20 miles outside of town. Closest neighbor is two or three football fields away.

vEddY · Post by **vEddY** » Sun Jan 25, 2015 10:29 pm

Bertotti wrote:You know how I got away from the bothering the neighbors thing. I moved 20 miles outside of town. Closest neighbor is two or three football fields away.

I'd love to be able to do that, but it's just not that feasible. Difficult to find a place here, almost everyone lives in appartments so.. no-go

Bertotti · Post by **Bertotti** » Sun Jan 25, 2015 10:37 pm

I had to take a job in a very rural area to be able to do so myself and finding the job was the hard part. Fortunately there are all kinds of options to help be quite and still musical in apartments.

jeremykeys · Post by **jeremykeys** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 3:53 am

Yeah. I know how nice it would be to be far away from people and annoying them with my recording but unfortunately that won't happen for a long while. We're saving as fast as we can because both myself and my wife totally hate living in the city but basically it all boils down to money.

On another note; all musical puns always intended; I do totally get that the sound you are using must be inspiring or else what is the point?
I just get tired of people going on and on and on about which is better. Tube or digital. Analogue or digiatal. Tube or solid state.

The truth as far as I can see it is that no one is actually better and no one is actually worse. It all depends on your application of the sound. That and personal taste. I use tube pre-amps to record through but record in a digital domain.
Why? Because for me, that gets me the sound that I want sometimes.
And sometimes I don't use the tube pre-amps. Does any one sound better?
Depends on how you define better.
Time for bed now!
For me and this discusion. Let's just make the best music that we can and enjoy the fact that we are musicians and the world would be a much sadder place without us.

Live and Love!

Kevin Nolan · Post by **Kevin Nolan** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 10:33 am

Good thread. I take back a lot of what I said about DSI in particular - good to read service is good and - a lot of my argument was based on a price of $3800, not $2800

What happened there is that Sonicstate.com made a mistake in reporting the price, and have corrected it. $2800 is indeed a very fair price for whats on offer.

It does sound very good for sure, but being just 4 octaves is going to be a problem for 2 handed keyboard players. i know you can use midi controllers and so on, but theres no substitute to sitting at the keyboard.

I still mantain Oberheim and Linn Are charging too much, while DSI Pro2 is allso very expensive, even compared to the arguably superior Sub37. Pro12 on the otherhand seems fairly priced for sure.

Great NAMM all round- the big picture for synths is looking very good right now.

jimknopf · Post by **jimknopf** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 5:22 pm

Meanwhile I detected a really dumb limitation on the otherwise great Prophet 6: a three digit number design for patches, not even short names? They can't be serious, doing that with 1000 available presets!

Rockitman · Post by **Rockitman** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 7:55 pm

I have a few Dave Smith Synths and I think they are great.
I am going to get a Prophet 6 mainly because it's familiarity
and nostalgia. The first synth I played in a band was a prophet 10.
I did not own it and could not afford a Prophet 5 back then as I was 21.
Anyway, I emailed DSI once to get tech support on my evolver keyboard.
The guy who emailed me back was Dave himself.

vEddY · Post by **vEddY** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 10:24 pm

jeremykeys wrote: On another note; all musical puns always intended; I do totally get that the sound you are using must be inspiring or else what is the point?
I just get tired of people going on and on and on about which is better. Tube or digital. Analogue or digiatal. Tube or solid state.
Why? Because for me, that gets me the sound that I want sometimes.
And sometimes I don't use the tube pre-amps. Does any one sound better?
Depends on how you define better.

Whatever fits the song is the best, it doesn't matter if it's tube or solid state, analog or digital. I really don't care about that crap. That's why I have all sorts of options except (pun intended) a decent analog polysynth. That's where P6 might fit perfectly and so far I like what I heard. Prophet 08 that I have doesn't fit that profile although it sounds amazing. But different to what I need.

I had an experience last week that just further reinforces my true belief that there's a whole bunch of musicians that are just full of crap up to their eyeballs. I took a friend to a music store, he's a very good guitar player and he's loking for an amp. We spent three hours testing stuff and ended up liking one of the new Line 6's, and preferred that to tube Randalls, H&K's and a bunch of other amps. He really, really sounded good with that amp. And when we took a break he said that he feels that this amp doesn't have character this way. Let me translate that for you - Line 6 doesn't sound as something that has character because it's Line 6. He spent three hours trying to get a clean sound that Fender Strat produces in his "sweet" 2nd or 4th switch positions - on his own, completely un-Fender-like, high-gain guitar. After a couple of hours I just gave up and left. Too much posing for my taste. It's not that Line 6 lacks character in sound (that amp has plenty of it), it's "someone else" that's lacking character.

So, again, whatever fits the sound you're looking for, is the best.

vEddY · Post by **vEddY** » Mon Jan 26, 2015 10:30 pm

Kevin Nolan wrote:Good thread. I take back a lot of what I said about DSI in particular - good to read service is good and - a lot of my argument was based on a price of $3800, not $2800

What happened there is that Sonicstate.com made a mistake in reporting the price, and have corrected it. $2800 is indeed a very fair price for whats on offer.

It does sound very good for sure, but being just 4 octaves is going to be a problem for 2 handed keyboard players. i know you can use midi controllers and so on, but theres no substitute to sitting at the keyboard.

I still mantain Oberheim and Linn Are charging too much, while DSI Pro2 is allso very expensive, even compared to the arguably superior Sub37. Pro12 on the otherhand seems fairly priced for sure.

Great NAMM all round- the big picture for synths is looking very good right now.

Agreed on all accounts. And I noticed the SonicState error, as well. What can you do, people sometimes mess up. They usually don't and I like their site a lot. But it happens.

Just a thought - have you considered waiting for a rack unit in case it comes out? That way you'd have what you might like, without the hassle of carrying around another unit that's too small for your style (trust me, I'm not messin' with you, I don't like 4-octave keyboards as well - hell, I don't like 5-octave ones!). I'm actually really keen on seeing if they're gonna release that as I'd really prefer having that thing in a rack, whatever the size.

jimknopf · Post by **jimknopf** » Thu Sep 24, 2015 4:39 pm

Got one today, after a long testing session and comparison with a dozen other synths in a big shop in Cologne. I still don't like using preset numbers in 2015. But the rest was THAT convincing to me, that I would call it "my synth of the year".

After another two hours in my homestudio I'm completely blown away, both by the incredibly well done UI, and the sonic character and flexibility of the analog circuit.

Nice addon: on Dave Smith's homepage there is a bonus bank of 300 patches from the "Old Men of MIDI" with the likes of Jordan Ruddess, Jerry Kovarsky, Jack Hotop, John Lehmkuhl etc. etc., if some of these names sound familiar to you.

Bachus · Post by **Bachus** » Thu Sep 24, 2015 6:50 pm

jimknopf wrote:Got one today, after a long testing session and comparison with a dozen other synths in a big shop in Cologne. I still don't like using preset numbers in 2015. But the rest was THAT convincing to me, that I would call it "my synth of the year".

After another two hours in my homestudio I'm completely blown away, both by the incredibly well done UI, and the sonic character and flexibility of the analog circuit.

Nice addon: on Dave Smith's homepage there is a bonus bank of 300 patches from the "Old Men of MIDI" with the likes of Jordan Ruddess, Jerry Kovarsky, Jack Hotop, John Lehmkuhl etc. etc., if some of these names sound familiar to you.

I go and visit musik store in Cologne two or three times a year, just to test new and not so new test, i will be there next weekend, and i put the prophet 6 on my list..

NuSkoolTone · Post by **NuSkoolTone** » Thu Sep 24, 2015 7:05 pm

jimknopf wrote:Got one today, after a long testing session and comparison with a dozen other synths in a big shop in Cologne. I still don't like using preset numbers in 2015. But the rest was THAT convincing to me, that I would call it "my synth of the year".

After another two hours in my homestudio I'm completely blown away, both by the incredibly well done UI, and the sonic character and flexibility of the analog circuit.

Nice addon: on Dave Smith's homepage there is a bonus bank of 300 patches from the "Old Men of MIDI" with the likes of Jordan Ruddess, Jerry Kovarsky, Jack Hotop, John Lehmkuhl etc. etc., if some of these names sound familiar to you.

Enjoy man! Wish I had the justification to get one. That's the first DSI that truly sounded "Analog" to me.

jimknopf · Post by **jimknopf** » Thu Sep 24, 2015 7:43 pm

Bachus wrote: I go and visit musik store in Cologne two or three times a year, just to test new and not so new test, i will be there next weekend, and i put the prophet 6 on my list..

If you go, be warned though:
When I played their show room unit today, I was stuck by several weird issues: the patches didn't sound like those patch numbers I already knew from demos, as if something was wrong, and when I finally detected that the pitch wheel only worked downwards in all patches, I told them to replace the faulty unit. I was lucky that one of them had bought one himself just the other day (and was quite happy and excited about it by the way) and knew the difference well. So all went fine and I could take my time for testing.

Just check their unit before getting any wrong impression