The Alesis MMT-8 is perhaps the most popular hardware sequencer in existence. Praised for its pattern based sequencing and small size, and cursed for it crashes and lost data, the MMT-8 has found a home in studios around the globe. The MMT-8 is my sequencer of choice on the road, but I will be quick to point out that an Akai ASQ-10, Macintosh, and PC share duties in the studio. The MMT-8 is an eight track pattern based sequencer. Up to ninety-nine patterns can be stored in memory, although memory contraints normally limit this to around fifty. Pattern changes, track mutes, and tempo can be automated and stored as a song. Track editing is rudimentary, with basic copy, paste, erase, and merge functions. Event list editing is provided, but is useful only for very small edits. Quantization is applied after recording and spans a wide range of note durations. Swing quantization is not provided. Each track can contain all sixteen channels of MIDI data, so the eight track limit is not as restricting as expected. After losing days worth of work on my cousin's MMT-8 in fall of '91, I swore I would never use one again. Yet four years later I found myself using one religously, more for convenience than out of true love. Computer sequencers take time to boot, and hard drives are noisy, so my ideas often get recorded into the Alesis. Yet the MMT-8 curse struck again this past March, and this time I lost months of work. Several days after the pain wore off, I once again began recording with the MMT-8. I believe it is an addiction, one that cannot easily be cured. Note: The MMT-8 is an unstable radioactive device. It melts down without warning and all recorded material WILL be erased. MMT-8 Users Manual