Writing Music with an MMT-8

This evening I am back in my studio kicking around ideas and have connected my first sequencer, the Alesis MMT-8, to handle MIDI sequencing duties. I have been using the MMT-8 Sequencer for over 25 years now. It is a simple MIDI sequencer which pretty much does straight forward recording without the technical headaches which can happen when using a computer to run a DAW. There are a couple of things that do hinder the use of the MMT-8 (these can be overcome) and that is it has a small amount of memory (aftertouch and bender movements eat up a lot of space) and you have to save data via MIDI to a storage device. The MMT-8 has 8 tracks which allow you to bounce to other tracks as needed. It is a pattern based sequencer so you can take your different recorded parts and place them in a song mode in any order and copy them many times. Writing music is pretty efficient especially if you are like me and just play your music performance directly into a recorder without step sequencing. The MMT-8 does not do step sequencing which I do not mind or miss because I prefer to record what I am playing on the keyboard. Editing is done through menus and button presses. Sometimes I may go in and tweak a note or remove controller data I do not want. Even to this day with some limitations compared to modern DAWS I still prefer to use hardware to make music. I am planning to use the MMT-8 on my new project for 2016-2017 and cannot wait to see what old vibe I can conjure up from my personal past music making experiences.