This Fantasy Christmas Present series has pulled in two directions, with some choosing gear they can’t afford, justify or both, while others choose gear from their pasts which they would have loved to have had back in the day, or would love to revisit. Here’s a piece of gear from the late 80s which opened my eyes to a whole new world - MIDI sequencing!
In the early 90s my earliest experience of midi sequencing was hardware based. The backstreet studio that I worked in at that time was based around an eight track half inch Tascam 58 and an eight bus console. While the studio owner was interested in synthesisers, his increasingly electronic work was recorded live. A Roland R8 being a much used device in those days and quasi-sequenced lines were frequently provided by the LFO of a Roland SH09 running a square wave. He seemed comfortable with this but I was keen to explore sequencing and I was overjoyed when in one of the many gear swaps which seemed to pass through that studio, one day an Akai ASQ 10 appeared on loan. The Alesis MMT8 was the hardware sequencer of the day, priced very competitively but still beyond my almost non-existent means at the time. I was aware of the MMT8 and daydreamed about owning one but this Akai unit was a quantum leap in professionalism in my eyes.
Released in 1988 and pre-dating the genre-defining MPC 60, the ASQ 10 was the result have a collaboration between Akai and Roger Linn of Linn Drum fame. It was a professional hardware midi sequencer which, while it on paper seems to do much the same job as the MMT8, it did so using hardware that was miles away from the Alesis in terms of build quality. With all-metal construction and metal data knob, and heavy duty plastic buttons which would survive indefinite amounts of finger-stabbing, this device was built to last.
In terms of its technical capabilities it's laughably primitive when viewed from this distance, 60,000 notes in total, 99 sequences with up to 99 tracks each, a 3.5” floppy drive and a respectably large LCD display. It was all very well but even at this time, if you wanted control you could have an Atari ST and a copy of Cubase.
The aforementioned build quality was second to none, this unit could both build an house track or knock down an actual house with equal confidence! The connections were equally pro, with 4 midi outs, two midi in, MTC and facilities for SMPTE sync and more it would have made an excellent centrepiece for the missing midi workflow in that rundown local studio all those years ago. But we didn’t keep it.
In use it was immediate, intuitive and more capable than I realised. I quickly grew to love the possibilities presented by overdubbing over a loop, with the facility to erase mistakes (I really wasn’t used to that, being accustomed to analogue tape and yet to take my first steps into DAWs) and the idea of Quantize (on the ASQ10 referred to as “Timing Correct”). It also had a useful Help feature, which displayed plenty of information on screen on any feature you had the cursor over when you hit the ‘Help’ button. Just as well as we didn’t have the manual.
You can achieve much the same workflow in Pro Tools running in MIDI Merge but inevitably it’s not the same. Somewhere on a cassette I have some recordings made at that time, running the ASQ10 with an R8 (with 808 card), Juno 106, Juno 2, two Oberheim Matrix 1000s, a TB303 and a Quadraverb. I remember it sounded incredible. I don’t have a functioning cassette player to check on and I really don’t want to, it’s probably a car-crash but it was also a seminal moment in my journey into music production.
I’d love to try one again. The issue at the time was that it was just so expensive. At £1600 in ’88 it was about 5 times the price of the MMT8. However 35 years later those ASQ10s are probably still working. Cheaper plastic gear has probably all disintegrated by now.