Juan Atkins says:
"THESE DAYS, ATKINS works out of his 16-track Metroplex studio, which is currently located in his basement. The studio is based around a Fostex B16 with a Tascam desk and assorted outboard effects. Atkins currently sequences his MIDI instruments off a Korg SQD1, which he has used for all his Model 500 tracks to date. Wot, no computer? Atkins explains.
"I bought the SCI sequencer, the one that runs on the Commodore 64, when it came out. This was when MIDI was still real new, and the reason I don't use a computer now is because I had a bad experience with that sequencer. I'd be working on something for two or three hours and the computer would crash on me, so I was saving to disk every time I did something, just in case the computer crashed. There were other things, too, like you could patch one sequence onto the end of another, but there'd be a hesitation in the timing. I guess it was just bugs in the system, but that turned me off using computers and I went back to a more durable dedicated sequencer, which was the SQD1."
Atkins is fully aware of how much computers and MIDI software have improved since the early days.
"Now I go in studios and everybody's using Creator or Sonus software, and they've got Apples, Amigas and Ataris, and they're saying 'How come you're not using a computer?'." He expects to bow to the ipevitable eventually, as the SQDl simply won't handle what he calls "heavy-scale productions"."