The Birth of the Prophet VS

via LordFrito's Corner of the Web where you'll find the full post.

"The Birth of the Prophet VS
By Chris Meyer, ex-employee of Sequential Circuits
originally printed in the VS WaveWrangler User Guide, (c)1991 Interval Music Systems
updated 7/99 and 6/01 by the original author

The Idea

It all started some time in 1985. We were still working on the Prophet 2000 sampler, and as resident historian (in other words, I had the biggest archive of synth magazines and manuals), another engineer asked me to explain how various instruments performed waveform crossfades.

I had finished discussing the Fairlight, and had moved on the PPG - explaining its wavetables, and the ability for it to scan a group of waves first in one direction and then back again. While I was scrawling this back and forth motion in my notebook, suddenly a little twinge went off in the back of my head, and my hand drew the next line arcing down the page...and the concept of crossfading between waves in two dimensions, not just one, was born.

Trying to imagine what it would sound like to wander around a space with different waves in each corner was a little beyond most people's grasp at the time. So, I decided to patch it up at home on my rag-tag modular synthesizer..."