DAW-less dreams

I’m going through my hardware collection and I’m thinking about what caused me to buy a particular piece of gear. I recently bought the Ableton Move, which I think prompted all of this thinkery on my part.

I was on a kick with MIDI sequencers for a while. I think it started when I found an MMT-8 for sale locally. I bought it because of its legendary status and because the seller only wanted 80 bucks for it and all of the keys actually worked. I found out later that the only thing wrong with it was the green playback LED doesn’t work. Somehow I don’t think this is a very common problem. I never bothered to look into why it doesn’t light up.

Anyway it has an interesting workflow and I thought about cloning it for a while. It seems like it wouldn’t be that hard to do. Maybe write an emulator for the ROM. It’s anything but modern though. It’s not really a loop based machine even though it’s the loop mode that made it famous. Each track has its own button which I think set the standard for grooveboxes to come.

What’s particularly interesting about it is that it’s a fully featured sequencer. You can stream multi track midi at it and it will dutifully record it all. You can use it to back up full productions and record it digitally to cassette as a backup. Wow.

This got me thinking about all sorts of other vintage MIDI sequencers. I ended up with a Yamaha QY-70 also. I never did use it much but it amazed me how much of the MIDI standard these older devices supported. The expectations of musicians back then were more classical than electronic. If they didn’t support fine timing it would have been a deal breaker.

Following this theme I got an MPC500 and then an MPC1000. The 1000 I got because everyone said you can use another OS called JJOS. I never did install that, and I never used it much. I used the MPC500 all the time just to play samples. I got a second one when I was in my ones-and-twos phase of trying to go back and forth in a live setup like a DJ.

It’s kind of an ongoing thing though, I’m not sure when to stop. In the end it’s more fun when you get a bunch of dumb boxes with simple sequencers together on the table rather than spending a bunch of time and energy working around the limitations of the box you are trying to use as the “centerpiece” of a setup.