David Abernethy > Quotes

“As Rick Wakeman put it in the Moog DVD: “As a keyboard player, you could go on and give the guitarist a run for their money.”
― David Abernethy, The Prophet from Silicon Valley: The complete story of Sequential Circuits

“The defining moment that led to the creation of Sequential Circuits occurred in 1972 when Dave Smith, soon to be Sequential’s founder, bought a Minimoog synthesizer.”
― David Abernethy, The Prophet from Silicon Valley: The complete story of Sequential Circuits

“Ian Stanley: “We got a Prophet-5 in ’84, for the band, you know, me and Roland Orzabal. And the big story is that, you know, when you first buy a keyboard or you try it out in the shop or whatever it is, it can either inspire you or not. Pretty immediately, you’d either go, this is great, or not. And I think we bought the Prophet-5, we ordered it, and Roland took it back to his house and the next day he phoned me up and said, ‘Come and listen to this.’ So I went down to his house and he played me ‘Shout’, the bass line, which is the drone all the way through the song, and the middle bit, which was all Prophet-5. So he just had a drum machine and the Prophet-5. You know, that was a major turning point in our career. Because ‘Shout’ went on to become number one in 20-odd countries. These things, you get inspired by the sound of it, and it was purely this bass-note drone that created the whole song.”
― David Abernethy, The Prophet from Silicon Valley: The complete story of Sequential Circuits

“I think it was the morning of the second day of the show, we heard a rumor that Stevie Wonder had wanted to see the Emulator. And the next thing we know, there’s Stevie with his entourage—they came up to our booth and the NAMM photographers were taking pictures—and he comes up and he just hugs the thing and then he plays it and he listens to it and then he says, ‘Have my people talk to your people,’ and he bought, on the spot, serial number one. After it all cleared down, which took like an hour for this whole thing to happen, these guys from the next booth came over and said, ‘You guys couldn’t have paid any amount of money to get the publicity you just got.”
― David Abernethy, The Prophet from Silicon Valley: The complete story of Sequential Circuits

“The paranoia was such in the UK that the Central London branch of the Musicians’ Union (MU) tried to ban synthesizers in 1982. A motion was put forward and it actually got voted in, but then the reality of policing the ban sunk in and the ruling got watered down to the effect that musicians could not use synthesizers or drum machines to imitate other instruments and thus put other musicians out of work.”
― David Abernethy, The Prophet from Silicon Valley: The complete story of Sequential Circuits

“Indeed, the Prophet-5 was the first synthesizer to be shown on MTV, in the very first music video that was broadcast in 1981.”
― David Abernethy, The Prophet from Silicon Valley: The complete story of Sequential Circuits

“One of the significant milestones in building the high-tech community occurred in 1953 when Stanford University subdivided some of its vacant land for industrial development to form the Stanford Industrial Park (later renamed Stanford Research Park).”
― David Abernethy, The Prophet from Silicon Valley: The complete story of Sequential Circuits

“I’d heard of them but had never actually seen one in person. I went to look at it, and it was a perfect combination of my music background and technical background and I ended up buying it. I actually got a loan from the Credit Union at Lockheed for it, and I also ended up buying a Teac 3340 reel-to-reel 4-track recorder.”
― David Abernethy, The Prophet from Silicon Valley: The complete story of Sequential Circuits