Ryo Kawasaki

The man behind Rhythm Rocker, this guy is amazing, a total hero, check this out from a recent interview: "...I still use C64 for my commercial music productions such as CD albums and writing film scores or Jingles. I have written software called "Kawasaki Midi work station" around 1986 for C64 and made hand made sync box to go with. This is pretty serious MIDI sequencer and I designed it to be the way I like it to function. It only had one page of main screen for all the functions so that I didn't have to go to different pages for the different tasks or command, so it was more like a musical instrument for me and that is why I still used it even all the sophisticated sequencers available on the market such as Cubase. Because I can make new entire tracks on my sequencer while reading few pages of the manual for the new sequencer for PC or Mac and I am so impatient to read manuals for the new software, I lose passion and inspiration to make music itself, if I have to spend time to learn new machine or software.

It works both for midi and pulse sync, so I can sync with drum machine like Roland TR-808 or old drumulater while syncing with other Midi drum machine or sequencer. During the late 1980's, I have made many dance 12 inch singles (mostly House or Techno tracks) using this method and I hardly used tape recorders. All the vocal tracks were sampled on samplers such as Akai-S900 and Roland S-550 and fired by this seuencer. And the data for the entire song fit in the memory of C64, which I had about 40K out of 64K for music data for 4-7 minutes long song with many different parts. This sequencer had 8 tracks and it could work with both real-time input and step time input..."

Full interview here...