It is somehow fitting that in one of the most famous pictures about MIDI (the photo from the 1983 NAMM show where MIDI connected a Sequential Circuits Prophet 600 to a Roland Jupiter 6 in the first public demonstration of two products from different companies working together), John Bowen has his back turned to the camera.
John is quiet, unassuming man, but he helped to shape the industry we have today and contributed to the design and user interface of many well known synthesizers as well as creating the preset sounds for many, many instruments. Everyone who loves synths has heard John’s work.
At the 2025 NAMM show, The MIDI Association will recognize his contributions by awarding him a MIDI Association Lifetime Achievement Award along with new inductees Karl Hirano, Tadao Kikumoto, Tetsuo Nishimoto, Chris Meyer, Jeff Rona and Brian Vincik.
This is the first in a series of articles about the 2025 winners of the MIDI Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
How John Bowen is the glue that connected Bob Moog and Dave Smith
John Bowen grew up in the Bay Area and went to UC Berkeley (as did Don Buchla and Dave Smith) where he was introduced to Moog Synthesizers.
He played in bands and was always fascinated by sound and was intrigued by songs like The Beatles “Revolution Number 9”.
His first exposure to synthesizers was playing an Arp 2600 in a music store. He couldn’t afford the Arp 2600 (or even get a sound out of it at first) so he bought the manual from the store and started studying it and learning the names of the strange things that made synthesizer sounds-Oscillators, Filters, Envelope Generators, etc.
He went to another music store to try to experiment with the Arp 2600, but they didn’t have one. However they did a have Minimoog so John spent a bunch of time at the store playing around with Moog and trying to figure out why it somehow sounded different than the Arp.
In 1972, he rented a Minimoog for weekend to learn synths from Pat Gleason of Different Fur Trading company.
For many years starting in the 1930s, the NAMM show was held in Chicago (and occasionally New York). But in the 1970s, NAMM also started holding a separate “Western Market” show that alternated between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
John had gotten a job a music store and in made his way to the March 1972 “Western” NAMM show in San Francisco where he immediately went to the Moog booth. His band had recorded a version of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Tarkus and he used that to convince David Van Koevering to send him as a clinician to the next NAMM show in Chicago in June of 1972.
There he met Bob Moog who decided John was the right person to demonstrate Moog synthesizers. So John moved to Buffalo, New York and became the first official Moog clinician in 1973.
One of his first jobs for Moog was to accompany Bob to Japan. It would be the first of many trips to Japan for John.
In search of a sequencer
John started looking for a sequencer to use with the Minimoog for two reasons.
First, it would make it easier to demo the Minimoog and maybe more importantly, he wanted to use it in his band.
In 1976 he looked in Keyboard Magazine and found the names of two companies that made sequencers- Emu and Sequential Circuits. So he called them up and introduced himself as the Mooh clinician and asked if he could take a tour of their factories.
Both Dave Rossum and Dave Smith gave him the same answer. “We don’t have a factory, just a two bedroom apartment. Both companies were in San Jose which was a short drive from Oakland where John was living so he went down and met with both Daves separately.
Dave Smith offered to send John a Sequential Circuits Model 800 sequencer and John started using it at music stores and NAMM shows to show off the Minimoog along with the Maestro Drum Machine (Moog had been purchased by Norlin in 1973).
Dave and John then started to work on a design for the model 700 programmer. They both drew up designs and shared them. The result is a product that looks eerily similar to the Sequential Prophet 5.
John Bowen- The Father of factory presets
The Sequential Model 700- A programmer for a programmer
The Model 700 didn’t make any sounds, it actually added programmability to either the Minimoog or the Arp 2600. It was one of the first products that stored presets. It could store 64 programs (8 banks of 8 programs) withthe settings for attack, decay, sustain and release. There was also a built-in sequencer.
It could be said that John is the father of programmable Synth presets (the Arp soloist had the first Presets, but you couldn’t edit them).
You could store the settings for attack, decay, sustain and release. There was also a built-in sequencer.
Also it’s important to note that the Model 700 was really starting to look like a Sequential Circuits product with the buttons, the knobs and design elements (like the white border around the core programming area) that would soon become famous with the release of the Prophet 5.
John’s Influence on The Prophet 5 Design
When demoing the Model 700, John kept getting the same feedback- ” Can’t you integrate a synth engine into the programmer so everything is all in one portable package”.
At first Dave Smith didn’t like the idea, but he called John back a few months to say that Solid State Microelectronics was coming out with a new chip that would make a polyphonic synthesizer possible. So John and Dave started on the design of the Prophet 5.
As they had done with Sequential Model 700, both John and Dave drew up their ideas for design and user interface and worked out the details in a collaborative fashion.
John also contributed an idea for a feature that really changed the sound of music. John had seen Roger Powell create a sound by syncing two oscillators together. It was John’s idea to make this a feature on the Prophet 5 that would lead to a ton of great synth lead sounds like “Let’s Go” from the Cars and the solo sound from “Burnin’ Down the House” from The Talking Heads.
The Prophet 5 Factory Presets
Below Doctor Mix goes through Prophet 5’s factory presets all created by John Bowen.
These sounds still hold up remarkably well after almost 50 years!
It’s interesting that even though the Prophet 5 only had a display that would only show the number of the preset, John gave all the sounds evocative names in the manual for example Robot Hamsters or Under The Ice.
A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country
After the Prophet 5 came out, Sequential was quite successful for several years.
In other history articles on MIDI.org, we cover the development of MIDI, the Prophet 600 and other topics.
So we will focus this article on John and his contributions, but add some details about what happened to Sequential Circuits in the late 1980s.
Eventually by 1987, Sequential ran into financially difficulties for a number of reasons.
Japanese companies were starting to produce quality instruments at lower prices while at the same time Sequential Circuits invested heavily in areas. The biggest push was towards computer music and the promise of a huge mass marketing opportunity for synthesizers in multimedia.
The software to drive it was written by Third Street Software, a
company based in Laguna Beach, south of LA. Sequential shareholder Len Sasso was a co-founder of Third Street and began working on the interface software mid-1982. “Well, I was intimately involved with that,” says Len. “I was the programming partner in a small software company making productivity software—spreadsheet, word processing, accounting apps, etc— for the Commodore 32 [PET]. We sold that company and another programmer, Tim Ryan—eventual founder of Midiman and then M-Audio— and I started a software company called Third Street Software. We got a commitment from Dave and Barb to write software for a MIDI interface they would develop.
History shows that Sequential’s pitch at computer-based music
production was indeed a taste of things to come. But the market needed time to
develop. Home computer users and musicians were still finding their feet with
regard to computer usefulness in home and professional situations. Also,
technology needed to catch up to meet musicians’ aspirations. Although the
Commodore 64 was a popular home computer, by 1986, musicians who
embraced computers preferred higher-spec units, such as the Atari ST and Apple
Mac, in conjunction with advanced software from the likes of Digidesign,
Passport Designs, Opcode Systems and Dr. T.
David Abernethy
Excerpts from David’s excellent book-The Prophet from Silicon Valley: The complete story of Sequential Circuits
How John met Karl- The complicated story of Sequential, Otari, Yamaha and Korg
By the fall of 1987, things were pretty bad at Sequential. In fact, occasionally they couldn’t make payroll on time and had to ask employees to hold on their checks for a few days.
But soon several potential buyers appeared from Japan.
Otari was considering acquiring Sequential and might have used the 16 bit sampling technology from the Prophet 3000 sampler to develop a digital recording system that might have put Otari ahead of Avid.
But in the end, Yamaha acquired Sequential in December of 1987. When John, Dave Smith and Scott Peterson took a tour of the Yamaha warehouse and saw stacks of Yamaha TX16Ws they knew that Yamaha had not acquired Sequential for the sampling technology.
Yamaha formed DSD (Dave Smith Division) and DSD waited for clear direction from Yamaha on what to design and build.
Katsuhiko “Karl” Hirano had worked on the DX7 with Nishimoto-san and had also helped with communications between the International MIDI Association (IMA) , the MIDI Manufacturers Association (MMA), and the Japanese MIDI Standards Committee (JMSC and precursor to AMEI) so he seemed like a logical choice to liaison between Yamaha and the new DSD.
However the relationship with Yamaha was very short lived. There were communications problems caused by the fact that there were three parties involved – for legal reasons, Yamaha Corporation of America had actually acquired DSD and had to process all the paperwork and pay everyone, but the direction came from Yamaha Corporation of Japan so DSD was always caught in the middle.
Dave Smith
May 1988 Issue of Keyboard MagazineBy 1989, Yamaha had decided to move on and was going to close the Dave Smith Division, but the story of Dave Smith, John Bowen and Karl Hirano was about to take an unexpected turn that happened in small part because of a bet between Chairman Katoh of Korg and the author of this article (Athan Billias, Korg Inc. Planning Manager and Voicing Manager in Korg Japan from 1987-1994).
In another article about Hirano-san, we will tell the inside story of details of how Korg R&D came about and the fascinating story of the development of the Wavestation.
John’s recent projects
The following is a quote form John’s website- https://johnbowen.com/new/
Working as an independent since Fall ’99, he created more than a dozen synthesizer plug-ins for the Scope/Pulsar DSP platform that were known for their ease-of-use and sonic quality, including complete extremely accurate representations of the Pro One and Prophet 5, alongside with his flagship synth plug-in, the original Solaris ™.
Since 2007, he has been working with Sonic Core engineering to produce his idea of an extremely flexible and capable hardware synthesizer, called the Solaris, which has been widely praised and used by numerous film and TV composers, as well as synthesizer enthusiasts.
He feels his other contributions in synth concepts include the Prophet 5’s Poly Mod section and the term “Multitimbre”. However, he feels his most important contributions to the world are his sons!
Youtube from Espen Kraft
John Bowen worked for MOOG Music product clinician demoing music equipment for the major of the 1970s. He later went to work with Dave Smith helping with the early Sequential Circuits products to do limited programming and sequencing for the MiniMOOG as well as suggestions that influenced the design of the PROPHET-5.
Interview: John Bowen.1 / 13-Aug-2020 – // aNONradio //
https://anonradio.net/john-bowen/
A note from the author
Because of my decades long association with Korg and Yamaha, I have a lot of first hand knowledge of many of the people and events covered in this article.
However I want to acknowledge David Abernethy who wrote “The Prophet From Silicon Valley- The Complete Story Of Sequential Circuits”.
It is packed with tons of details and is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the history of synthesizers and MIDI.
Below is a link to David’s book on Amazon.
I’d also like to acknowledge Stanley Jungleib who worked at Sequential Circuits and Seer Systems and very closely with John Bowen and Dave Smith during much of his career.
Stanley’s history of MIDI from the draft version of the Prophet 600 manual (which was never shipped to customers) was invaluable in piecing together the early history of MIDI before its adoption.
About the author
Athan Billias was a Planning Manager and Voicing Manager at Korg Inc. Japan from 1987-1994 so was working in Japan when Korg started Korg R&D. He spent several years licensing IVL harmony technology to Yamaha between 1994 and 1998. Then in 1998 he started working as a Marketing Manager for Synthesizer n the Pro Audio and Combo Division of Yamaha Corporation of America (YCA). He became a Director of Marketing and was also the Head of Content Research and Development at YCA during the development of the Motif series of synths.
He has been on the Executive Board of the MIDI Association for several decades.
He is working on an article about his almost 50 years of experience with Yamaha and Korg synthesizers which culiminated in December of 2024 with a trip to Yamaha Corporation of Japan (YCJ) for an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of Yamaha Synths.
