Originally Posted by
GuitarGeek
Interesting, I remember reading an article on Jeff Lorber in the August 84 issue of Keyboard magazine, where he talked about how he had modified one of his sequencers, I think, so that it could use a floppy drive to load sequences, instead of the stock cassette interface. Apparently, it would take about 2 minutes to load sounds via the cassette interface, whereas the the floppy would take only about 9 seconds (but there was a typo in the article as printed, apparently whoever was inputting the written piece into the word processor hit the "0" key instead of the "-" key, so instead of "1-9 seconds", it read "109 seconds" which I think upset the guy who designed and rigged the mod, as he soon afterwards wrote in to correct them).
But I imagine samples and such would take longer to load than sequences, which I imagine is a simpler form of data (and therefore takes less memory).
I wonder how Tony Banks managed the Emulator II on the Invisible Touch tour, in that regard. Maybe that's why Phil had to launch into some of those monologues to introduce the songs: to give Tony time to load stuff on the Emulator.
I recall reading an article about someone, I think it was Vince Clarke, when he was still in Yaz(oo), where he said when they played live he used two Fairlights: one that he was using at any given time, and the other was loading the next song in the set. I remember Gregg Hawkes saying that he took four Roland sequencers on the Cars Heartbeat City tour, because each only could only hold about two or three songs at a time (and he had two of everything else, including the Synclavier, for backup purposes).
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