Manuals are available from Yamaha on-line: you have to resister first, but almost all Yamaha products are available in PDF format.

The QX-1 is outdated, yes, with only 8 tracks and a slow 5.25" floppy, but has rock-solid construction and performance. I also have Cubase VST loaded on a Power Mac, but I long for the software stability of a dedicated hardware sequencer (like the QX series) 'cuz the damn program crashes at least once per session.

I just bought a used QX-3, since it is a bit more sophisticated vs the QX-1 and has 16 tracks with a 3.5" floppy.

Regards, Chris

1) 100,000 note sequencer 2) 384 ppq! (which is 4 times more than the usual 96 ppq you see with current hardware sequencers) 3) On-board alpha-note entry (rather than just MIDI note numbers) 4) Incredible timing and feel...which one would expect with 384 ppq.

Now, there are some disadvantages to the unit: 1) 5¼" floppy drive (which is active ALL THE TIME!) 2) Can be slow when editing sequences over 50K (but not as slow as "10 - 15 minutes" as Bruce Perry stated below). 3) Has 8 outputs (one for each track), but can only send up to 4 MIDI channels per output. I worked around this by getting a pocket-sized MIDI-merge box and considated two outputs. Occasionally, I would split voices on the same MIDI channel to get more than one voice/channel.

Yeah, it's a monster and it's old, but if you can get one for under $125 (and you can find lots of 5¼" floppies!) it's still a good machine.

The one I used to use always suffered from corruption on the five and a quarter

floppy drive (yes, it's that old!), that I gave up with it. One thing to bear in mind if you buy one, there are a few modes, namely play,

edit, record & utility (if i remember correctly). Each time you move from

one mode to the other, it saves everthing, which can be very frustrating,

epecially since, after editing a track it would normally take 10 - 15 minutes

to save it before you could play back your efforts. To be honest, these days if you're looking for cheap sequencing, get yourself

an Atari and cubase. It'll prove much more productive.