Wow, I finally got it. 2 days of using it, plugging all my gear into it. First impression: It sounds so musical(think old meat beat manifesto, DR DRE, Aphex Twin’s older stuff. I had the sensation of 80s and early 90s music rushing through everything I was recording. This was not hard at all to use and figure out. The feel is so different to me. Not like the atari, not like the drunken computer pc jitter, and not like the I CAN’T SYNC MY TRACKS MAC. I would turn on the recorder, and magick happens. Wow, I can actually still write drums. What hurt my last release was my drums, I would sit for days messing with battery and recording myself playing and never be impressed, even with swing on logic, nothing ever sounded right. the sound quality of the software even with the elite fx did nothing for me. Now, I have an emu e6400 ultra sampler(known for fast midi response, you have to be aware that some gear will add midi slop on their inputs, old emu stuff was really bad, so was the roland s550 and 770 with out the turbo board, Akai S samplers are really quick with midi as well), those same libs, with the korg tr-rack, I can spit out any kind of drum sound I want and get it to sound great, swing, punch and hit tight and realistic. There is a swing all the time, and that is good because it makes it sound a bit more live and human, but not great for super robotic stuff like the atari ST does. I can put this thing in a single measure loop, and just write drums like mad and come up with tons of stuff fast. It records right. It plays back what I play in. PC would never be right in loop mode, I would have to stop and edit. Mac would drop notes and put quantized stuff in the wrong place. USB is the devil for midi. So recording rhythm is really evil on all computers. This has been my experience since I left the atari back in 1997(something I regret to this day). This takes some getting used to. I have never used hardware sequencers. I have always used graphical tape recorder style like Cubase 1.0 interfaces. Where I could copy and paste at ease, repeat stuff easy, move stuff around really easy. This is no longer the case here. Now, I have to pay attention to bars and measures and time. I used to edit my songs visually and I think this is a bad thing, now I have to use my ears and memory instead of my eyes. The way the asq10 is set up is pretty easy to understand, its kind of like patterns, but not really.

Sequences are like patterns, except that you can actually turn a sequence into a full song if you would like. Sequence mode is “Main Mode”. Then there is “Song Mode” which is more like a tracker, where you sequence the sequences like patterns. You set how many times to play each seq. Once you set this up, you can convert this into a sequence as well if you want to do fine edits. Fine editing can only happen in “MAIN MODE”. I have managed to do some basic copy operations. But copying and deleting and arranging tracks is going to take some getting used to. I don’t mind because this thing records me playing way better than any PC or MAC I have owned over the last 15 years with almost every interface you can think of. I like how it makes my e6400 and tr-rack sound when writing drums. Love how it makes my bass lines play with the drums. I am so impressed so far. I can see why everyone told me on gear slutz to get an mpc60. The Asq-10 is the sequencer from the mpc 60 that roger linn wrote. That guy is a genius. His timing swing and tight midi is really good, so much better than any daw playing hardware(hardware sounds better than software, so I don’t care about tight soft synths and soft samplers because the sound is whack. I love how this makes my midi sound like a tight human band, not a tight robot. There is the head bobbing rhythm thing that can ensue when using the asq10 and mpc60. I figured out how to use the step editor and this really kicks ass compared to some of the other ones I have used. You go step by step by 16th and 32nd notes, so the screen isn’t so cluttered and confusing :) You can insert any midi CC stuff, bank and program changes if you know how to do the bank, its cc#0 value 0, cc#32 value 0 thru 10 for banks. Yay. I had to read on the net how to pull that off. Now you know too(also works on the mpc60). Loading and saving off the floppy drive I thought was going to suck, but guess what, its really fast :) Editing track names, and file names is cool, once you go into the name editor, you can use the buttons on the front, they all have a letter by them. I couldn’t be happier. One thing that sucks, there is no way to save midi files with the OS version I have. Not sure if there is a way to convert them in the computer or not. I love spinning the dial on the BPM controls. WOW, so cool ahahah. This thing is tight, musical, and sounds so much better sequencing hardware over modern computers and a lot of other hardware sequencers.

I see this as the king of the hill when it comes to hardware sequencers with it’s 2 midi ins and 4 midi outs built in plus smpte ins and outs. It’s important to not send too much midi out 1 midi out, so having 4 outs and spreading out the midi load more really helps things sync and sound tight, the Asq-10 pulls it off. Sure it’s kind of big and the screen is ok but could be much bigger but that doesn’t put me off too bad. Another big plus is that this thing boots up and is ready to go in seconds, unlike my daw that takes me forever to get into and load stuff up. There is no latency with this, and switching through the outputs and controlling stuff with a keyboard via the inputs and out into external gear is really fast and responsive unlike computers with a heavy cpu and audio load. One bad thing I have run into is that there is no UNDO :( so I have to be really careful. There is a help button and it works in every mode you are in for most functions as well, this is a really user friendly hardware device. Also I really love how you can delete while in loop mode, you hold the erase button and hold down the key on the keyboard or drum pad you wish to delete. Also once you stop, if you don’t like erasing the bar on the track is like a two button task, so its pretty quick. I still wish that someone would make a hardware sequencer that is MIDI ONLY with 8 midi outs and 4 midi ins, swing options and robot options with a touch screen interface for drag and drop tape style cubase look and make it super tight and has smpte and all the sync options, self contained and turns on instantly like this one does. Honestly, even with the audio engine off on logic, it’s still not right even with the amt8. I am so sick of modern midi. Midi is fine if you have good hardware with fast midi response, and if you use an old atari or mpc60, mpc3000, or asq10, qy770. This is how you get tight midi that sounds more musical. This is how you get good drum sequences. Sure sample accurate software can have robotic timing or swing, but it sounds like crap to me(even with the best converters on the market), thin, lifeless, cold, tweety, stale, and boring sound. I need my hardware, I will not move out of the analog dedicated machine age of music composing ever again, so i need a midi sequencer that holds up sounds tight and records right. DAWS FAIL AT THIS. My emu, rolands and hardware sound thicker, punchier, more present, and sits in the mix way better and much easier to mix as well. I have proven to myself that I can infact still write drums, I just needed something that records midi correctly to do it well. I did try the MPC-1000 with the jjos and it has a crap sound, sounds like computers, crappy fx and cuts the transients of your samples off, so the attack is never right on some samples. I got this with out the drum brain for 350 + shipping. USB MIDI DOESN’T CUT IT on recording or playback on hardware. I think this is a gift from the GODs for me.

The above Video is the results of like 5 minutes of messing with it and my hardware, I was able to get a tight fast aggressive seq, with all instruments being played live real time with no slop or bad timing. I cannot believe how easy it is, how tight it is, how much more inspiring to use it is. I feel like a 10 ton weight has been lifted from my musical creation frustrations that I have had since leaving the atari in 1997 :( …. I make no jokes, I turned to guitar music on my last LP because of how bad midi timing on my DAWS were with usb. This will get me back to the aggressive dance sound of VAC. I welcome it. One last thing as well. With this, it turns on fast, feels immediate, I feel connected to it because it is so responsive, daws feel like a big fat clumsy elephant compared to this with latency. On this, there is nothing to distract me, no emails, no instant messages, no web forums calling out my name. This focuses me on music. Computers tend to distract me from music. I give this an 9 out of 10. Not perfect because the user interface could be a little better.

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The above image is logic’s midi not lining up when tracking in sequences. For a while I have been struggling with midi. I started using hardware synths and drum machines ages ago in tandem with my Atari ST computer. The atari ST had built in midi ports. With notator or cubase software on the atari, you could get midi jitter down to about 1 to 3 ms. This is just right and sounds super tight. Even with one midi out daisy chaining through all the midi throughs of my synths, the songs I made had this syncopated musical sound that I just do not feel and hear today. I started on the atari, so I was spoiled by that timing, and came close to cubase on the PC with a serial port interface before USB took over. That still did not match the swing and tight feel of the atari. I have been struggling with this since I left the atari for the pc back in 1997. The Atari ST was a computer, so why was it so much better at midi? Well for starters the midi on the computer was built in and had DMA access, so the cpu could interface directly with it via memory instead of through a bus. The graphics were in monochrome, so the computer was not doing much. When you load a program on the atari, there is no multitasking apps. So the only thing running was the midi program and nothing else. The machine was dedicated to performing that task with exact timing and response, and listening to midi for notes. I could play anything in to the metronome and it would sync up so tight and play exactly what I played in. On a modern PC with USB midi, this is not the case at all on logic or cubase or any of the applications I have tried. Modern PCS boast millions of colors on the screen, background multitasking for printers, mice, ethernet, networks, file indexing, and all kinds of malware on the pc. the computer is task switching, which makes perfect timing impossible. This is why audio sounds bad in the box as well when compared to high en outboard gear. Task switching never will give you real time accurate audio and midi. Multitasking OS systems are your enemy when it comes to midi and audio. DONE IT ALL, TWEAKED ALL THE OS SETTINGS. TRIED ALMOST EVERY MIDI INTERFACE. Followed all the advice on cubase and logic. No Bueno. Nothing I have done on a pc or mac has made the midi rock solid like an atari or a hardware seq. NOTHING. Dedicated hardware is better always.

Granted, If you sequence with software synths and software drum machines, you will have sample accurate timing and that is great. My problem is that software sounds thin, empty, colorless and boring, it doesn’t punch or have character like hardware does. Even if I use color and warming vst plugins, it doesn’t even come close to how my hardware sounds. I love my hardware, I love the way my emu samplers and roland samplers sound over any software based sampler. I like how my korg trinities sound over any pcm sample based playback workstation plugin vst. I like my virus A, and an1x, Jp8080 and nord rack 2 way more than any VA software synths in the box. I like how juno 106, mks50s, and mophos sound over anything in the box. I prefer my hardware reverbs and built in fx on my synths to any FX that are in the box. You get the point. Dedicated gear sounds better than software. This still doesn’t even address the JAM. I mean when you are jamming on your gear and it is responsive and tight, and the midi is as well. Having to stop and edit can really get you out of the spirit of jamming. I was testing logic all this week, and would play in stuff, and it would put the drums in the wrong place with or without quantizing. It would drive me nuts, this has been the case on all my MAC and PC midi applications. The atari was rock solid. Modern PCs are not at all. So I now reject all DAWS(I think this is why modern music sucks, too much DAW sound and bad timing mixed together).

So I ditched my DAWs and went into the world of workstations. I bought the Korg M3, because I saw some cool videos on the touch interface and the new update with the sequencer enhancements to make it more computer like. Got it home, plugged in my trinity rack to it and started sequencing the trinity in loop mode. OMG this was super tight and musical and machine like, how I remember the atari. Then the real test, write more drums with internal m3 sounds, and then add a lot of fx. Yes, now the timing gets bad, once the workstation has to start thinking and using a lot of processing for the audio engine. Now its true multitasking colors show their spots. WOW. I payed 1500 for the m3, not only do the sounds completely suck and have this harsh annoying mid range, sound super vanilla and like elevator music. The fx were tamed down from the triton and trinity as well. I remember back in the day the trinity was the same way, tight if the sequence was working alone with no sounds and fx on the trinity running, sloppy once you put a system load on it. So back to the store went the M3.

Enter the Mpc-1000. Yes, I got this a while back, and it and the M3 both suffer from BLAND SOUND SYNDROME, sounds more like a PC than old hardware. The biggest sin on the mpc is that if you cut the samples perfect on the pc, like a 909 kick, play it back on the MPC 1000 and the initial click of the transient on the sound is gone! no matter what I tried, all fx off, attack to 0 on the env. NO GO. Even with the JJOS this was a problem. The sequencer on the mpc 1000 is Tight. I mean like atari ST Cubase Tight! So that was a plus, had a lot of good editing features as well. Still the swing is not as good as the mpc 60. I sold it for this flaw. I wasn’t about to pay 1200 for a sequencer with a small screen and bad sound.

So I then tried my E6400′s Sequencer. WOW this is super tight, holy shit. But, the ability to edit the recorded midi is a nightmare, limited, no step seq, its terrible. But man is it tight, depressing.

Back to the atari? I don’t have the space, I don’t want to deal with hard drives and big monitors. Not to mention that I need more ins and outs midi wise. I have been trying for years to find a used Atari ST with a hard drive, and midex for cubase with no luck, and notator withe the unitor is hard to find too. I did not like notator at all, its tighter than cubase, but I don’t like pattern based sequencing really. Not into score writing either so this is a big NO for me. Another thing I hated about ataris is the finicky floppy drives, like your ST will read and write disks it can read fine, but try and put those disks in another Atari ST, LOL half the time it wont even work. I have the old programs on floppy disks still, but i doubt they will even work. Watch the below clip.

The mpc60. Roger linn, the timing freak, yes he made the lindrum and the os in the mpc60 and mpc3000. They swing, record perfectly what you play, play it back perfect. Watch the above demo, and you see the tight seq I am talking about, how easy it is to get a beat up and going, how tight it plays it back, and how perfectly it records the jam. This is what computers FAIL at. They never record it quite right. This is what I want. I don’t like the akai samplers, their mpcs, and what not, I like roland and emus sound much better. So what am I to do?

Enter the Akai ASQ-10 hardware midi sequencer, with 2 midi ins, and 4 midi outs, no sound engine, no multitasking. Same Roger Linn os as the mpc60. I just won this on EBAY, I hope it works, I read that the screen was a bit dim but readable, so I decided to order a back light that I found for it on ebay. So hope all goes well. If it is anything like the video above, I will be in heaven. No joke. That is what I want, tight midi, tight grooves, tight seqs. If you want to hear an example of tight midi on a VAC track, go listen to “HELL 2″ on BTE vol 2.

This is tight, listen to the drum rolls at 2:34 in the video above, I have not been able to get crisp drum rolls like that since the atari ST. This is the Atari ST with cubase into my DR 660 drum machine. So fucking tight(granted the sound quality blows, mackie 1604 into an adat, into a mackie 1604 again, into a sony walkman dat player, LOL). The arps are tight as hell as well. This is why and how VAC lost a lot of its edge and aggressive sound. The timing is crucial for stuff like this. Wish me luck, I really hope this Akai ASQ-10 is the answer to my timing and recording sessions. The korg M3 was tight, as long as I didn’t use anything else but the sequencer on it. The mpc 1000 was, but it played my samples back with cut off transients. This is just the sequencer, so now I am hoping I am finally in the tight world of Roger Linn after this. I will have to get used to some of the limitations of hardware sequencers. I don’t care. I need 4 outs, and the atari wont give me that. I need rock solid midi recording and timing. I think I might actually get my wish now.

Click Here to Listen to VAC’s Korg Tr-Rack Synth Demo.

This is my secret weapon. It can step in and do most any job. Yeah, the sounds are compressed rompler stuff, but seriously, the filters in this have this wet sound, this air to them that really makes things cut in the mix and sound lush and vibrant. I love the filters on this, I tried to like the triton, but the filters were not the same. I tried to love the M3, but the filters just don’t come close. These filters can sounds very acidic, and almost roland like, but a wee bit thinner. This is what is great, because you can stack so many sounds together and create these lush landscapes. With sound diver on the PC I am able to edit just about anything I want and get this to go where i need it to. Digital sample oscillators and two amazing filters to run in series or parallel. In combi mode, this is where the dream scapes happen and blow your mind away. Atmosphere and absynth on the PC TRY to do what this does, and they both fail big time. What is it about the trinity that makes it so special. In combi mode you can stack 8 programs on top of each other. You have 8 insert fx and 2 master fx. LOTS OF FX POWER! These fx are really good too. I prefer them to the ksp8 fx, not kidding either. The compressors with the verbs on drums can bring out brutal in your face industrial sounds. Add some over drive to a bass line and tweak the filter and you get mean acid. The bread and butter presets suck. But the motion synth presets are really good in combi and prog mode. The drums in this are the best workstation drums I have ever heard. All you need is 2 of these things, and you can cover a lot of ground. In the combi mode, you can make this like a vast array of modular synths. The modulations in this are really good and you can really get the sounds to animate, you can hear this in my audio clip above.

TR-Rack vs Trinity. Well, no touch screen. But seriously, I can edit the fx from the front panel no problem, I figured out how to use the interface without sound diver, but you need sound diver to edit some things like the envelopes because the front panel wont let you edit everything unfortunately. You cannot upgrade these. But the good thing is that there are 4 banks of rom sounds, and the trinity synth only has 2 unless you buy the rom cards and install them your self. When I had my trinity keyboard, I didn’t have that much other gear so I was using it in seq mode which is the multitimberal mode, 16 tracks, and there you get sounds without fx, and you have to custom build your fx chains and send your parts to them in the fx mixer page of the sequencer mode. In this mode you don’t get to use the great combi patches, so in old vac I hardly ever used those. Now that i have two racks I can use one for drums, and one for combis. Seq/Multi mode on the rack is really limiting, because you only get one memory so you have to manually change it on every song you make and back it up on the computer via sysex. The small screen makes editing the multi really hard, and you cannot see patch names only bank and numbers in this mode. So multi is a no go for the racks. So you get one patch at a time in prog mode, and get to layer up to 8 programs in combi. The racks are not good for multi timber setups. I like using the TR racks in prog and combi mode. This works out great for me, and its easy to take a preset and mangle it with fx. The FX are so great, verbs, delays, flanger, phaser, chorus, decimator, bit crunch, limiter, amp sim, over drive/high gain. All of these can make lush or super mean and twisted sound depending on how you tweak the parameters. The DACs on these are better than the triton. Tritons sound crunchy, these have this warm color to them. This air to them that I have not heard on any other synth to date. Not even the flag ship oasys has this AIR in the sound that I love so much. Seriously. I have read reviews on sonic state that said, you cannot do industrial with this, truth is, i made most of calling of the dead with a trinity keyboard. So they obviously don’t know how to mess with FX worth a shit. LOL. No software fx, and rompler can even touch the sound quality and fx quality of the trinity. The triton cannot either. The m3 fx are damn good, but the filters and sounds are not as good in my opinion. What I cannot believe is that these racks go on ebay now for about 200 to 300 dollars. In the right hands. These can kick major ass. I give this a 15 out of 10. No joke, this is my favorite workstation of all time.

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Click here for VAC’s Nord Lead 2 Rack Demo mp3.
Warning, the nord lead presets suck! they suck! So do not judge the synth by those. What can I say. I’m back to digital. Not to software, I still think software sucks and sounds no where near as good as latency free, hands on real knob controls, and dedicated hardware that is not sharing its processing power with a stupid bloated inefficient operating system like osx or windows. The above demo is live through a mackie onyx, with a little bit of large chamber verb from the lexicon pcm 96. Recorded into logic 8 via an Apogee Duet. I love it. No joke. This is what I was after the whole time, I used to have a nord lead 1 expanded, and I loved it and used it all over calling of the dead and fun with knives. It would give me super aggressive leads and I could tweak the hell out of it and make it sound really mean and evil and pissed like a hissing spitting grinding angry machine. My modular did get me there with a slightly fatter sound with unstable unmusical oscillators(What makes me prefer the nord to the modular, FM, musical FM that stays in tune, could not get that out of an analog, this is how you get super mean sounds that stay musical, digital does this way better). Out of the virus a, and jp8080, and an1x that I have, this is the synth that delivers on the angry leads and arps. The nord 2 has distortion which I actually really like, it gives the filter a little more bite and its subtle. I love the filters on this, they remind me of CEM filters, but not really. They have their own sound. Made more for tweety type sounds. Great for bips and bleeps and modular sounding stuff, they are very musical and have a great color, this synth jumps out of the mix and can sit nice too. Another reason that I went back to the nord was fast responsive midi, the jupiter 8 was so bad with midi, with the encore kit it would drop notes and hang and all kinds of things. The nord is super tight with midi. My modular while it was exotic and unique, the oscillators where just not stable enough and scale good enough to be really musical. The nord gets me there on most fronts. Sure, it is not as fat as analog, but it layers with other sounds way better than my analogs did. I prefer the VAs for complex layered sounds, more room to work with.

What really sets this apart from other synths is the fact that it hardly aliases. So when you start playing notes up high on the keyboard, the sound stays together and doesn’t lose its fullness and turn into un-pleasant distortion like the Virus A thru TI still to this day does. The jp8080 also aliases really bad when you play it up high to the point that I never play it up high. The new nord lead 2x, well I have mess around with it at the store and think it sounds like it lost some of its quality, the sound is fainter and not as present. The nord lead 3 sounds plain ugly, thin and gross like a software synth. The nord 1 as they age get gritty because the dac’s get uncalibrated and end up sounding like a sid station. I find the nord lead 2 to actually deliver all the sounds my jupiter 8, 6, and modular gave me with a slight digital sheen, granted, it’s not as lush as analog. Doesn’t matter much in the mix. I find I can get it to sit perfectly, and with a little eq I can do what I want with it. There are no effects either, but who cares, buy some outboard fx because they sound better than internal most all the time. 16 voices of polyphony, 4 timbers, can layer 4 sounds together to make huge sounds. Unison is good, I love the portamento. The arp kind of sucks because you cannot sync it to midi clock or manually edit the tempo time in bpm. There are no names for patches, only numbers, and when you install a memory card and get 4 banks of 100, finding the sound without names is tedious. If you have a daw, you can send it arp lines no problem so no big deal. This is not the ultimate bass synth, in fact I think the virus does bass a lot better and why people flock to it over the nord lead. It is why I find the virus and nord Compliment each other well. One cannot replace the other. This is a lead synth, that can do good pads, strings, sound fx, arps, and leads. Easy to edit, way easier to make sounds with over the jp8080 and virus a. The interface is better. I don’t hear any stepping when I tweak the knobs either. I like the notch, band pass, and high pass filters on this way more than the an1x, jp8080, and virus multimode filters. The low pass is kind of boring and under whelming though. I give the other synths the edge on low pass filters. This is a tweakers wet dream. I give this a 7.5 out of 10.

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